How Can a Virtual Assistant Help to Grow Your Business?

We all know that running a business is no easy feat, and that it requires a great deal of time, patience, drive and motivation in order to continually grow your business day in day out. Whilst there are many things you, as an entrepreneur or business owner, can do in order to scale your business, this can bring with it both an increased workload and heightened stress. Many people overlook the idea of hiring a Virtual Assistant as they wrongly assume that VAs can only assist with administrative tasks, which, whilst this may save you time, may not necessarily contribute to business growth. However, this is not the case, and many VAs have a great deal of skills that they can implement and duties they can undertaken in order to help your business grow and become stronger. In this blog, we discuss the tasks that a Virtual Assistant can support you with and how they can help you to grow your business, without adding to your workload.

Social Media

Social media is extremely important when you are trying to successfully run and grow a business, as it allows you to showcase your brand, share interesting and useful content, engage with your target audience and build trust. However, keeping on top of social media can be a time consuming and daunting job, especially if you aren’t an avid user of social media yourself. As such, this is one task that can often be put on the backburner, where entrepreneurs or business owners are concerned. Hiring a VA can help to take the pressure off you with regards to social media, and they can assist you by posting on various social media platforms on behalf of yourself and/or the business, replying to messages and comments, engaging with your target audience and generally ensuring that all your business and/or personal social media platforms are filled with relevant, interesting and insightful content that can help grow your brand, and in turn, your business.

Financial Admin

An experienced VA should also be able to assist you with a number of financial administrative tasks. Keeping on top of your company’s payroll, sending invoices to clients, checking that all invoices are correct and up to date on the system, chasing invoices and paying invoices to clients are all things that can take up a great deal of an entrepreneur or business owner’s time each week or month, which could be spent on other tasks. Hiring a VA with experience undertaking these duties will mean that all aspects of financial admin are taken care of and also means that you won’t have to spend money hiring a specialist or someone in-house, saving you not only precious time, but  money too!

Recruitment

If you are looking to grow a business, this means you will, mostly likely, need to grow your team in order to meet your company’s needs and client’s demands. Recruiting new members of staff can be a long and timely process which involves writing a job description, posting the job advert to job boards, liaising with a recruitment agency (if you are using one), sifting through applications, arranging interviews, finalising contracts and on-boarding new staff. However, this is where a VA could step in. As long as your VA knows the basics with regards to what the job entails, what salary you are looking to offer and if there are any specific qualifications or personality traits you are looking for the successful applicant to have, then they can take the whole recruitment process off your plate. Passing recruitment over to your VA will not only save you time but will also help you to grow your business without you necessarily having to be actively involved, it’s a no brainer!

Human Resources

In addition to helping you source and bring on-board the most suitable and high calibre talent out there, the right VA can also act as your HR department to a certain extent. Several HR related tasks such as ensuring employees files are up to date, dealing with contracts, facilitating staff holidays and sick days, compiling of best practice and on-boarding booklets, sorting out sick and holiday pay and dealing with minor HR issues can all be passed over to a VA with some previous experience dealing with similar duties. If your company aren’t yet big enough to have your own in-house HR department, but you find that these tasks are too time consuming to handle either on your own or with the help of employees who’s time is better spent focusing on other aspects of the business, then a VA is the best solution. They can help you to complete the vital tasks, keep HR files and functions in order and, if needs be, they can always consult and outsource any tasks that are outside their remit to a HR shared services business. This will mean that, unless required, you will not need to be involved in any HR related duties and can spend your time focusing on your other important responsibilities as a business owner. Furthermore, it will also save you money which can be utilised in other areas of business growth, as you will not need to employ a dedicated in-house HR employee which can be extremely costly.

Reports & Analytics

For smaller businesses, tracking metrics and setting targets both online and offline are extremely important for success, especially when trying to grow your business. Regardless of what metrics you are looking at, seeing the numbers, statistics, graphs and analytics in front of you can help you get a better understanding with regards to where your business is at right now, and what needs to be implemented, changed or bettered in order to improve the success of your business in the future. This is another task which, with the right VA, can help to grow your business each week, month and year. There are a number of different analytics a VA can help you to track, for example, website analytics, where your VA can gather statistics on how many people are viewing your website, where they are viewing the website from geographically, what pages seem to be most visited on your website, how long they spend on the website and how many people are visiting your website off the back of social media posts. In addition to website analytics, your VA can also look into social media analytics which will enable you to see which posts people are engaging with most. This will help you to get a better understanding of the most relevant content for your target audience and allow you to increase brand awareness which will, in turn, lead to higher revenue. Having looked at the analytics, your VA can then compile a report for you so that you are able to easily review the data and information and decide what the best course of action to take would be.

Project Management

The majority of VA’s within the current market will either have prior experience project managing with past clients or within previous roles, or may even have a project management qualification under their belt. Whether this is an in-house project or a project you are undertaking on behalf of a client, a VA can set you up on a project management software such as Asana and ensure that all those involved have access to a thorough brief, know exactly what aspects of the project they are responsible for and when their individual and company wide deadlines are, whilst ensuring everyone stays on track. With regards to business growth, it is important that, especially where client projects are concerned, you have someone in place who can oversee a project from inception to delivery. If no one is monitoring the project, or this is something that is done on an ad-hoc basis by either the company owner or someone within the project team on top of their day to day role, then there is more chance of key parts being missed or people missing important deadlines. If you are missing deadlines or not delivering exactly what is asked by a client, this will potentially lead to you losing out on future business or having a bad reputation. However, with a VA in place to oversee the project, you are more likely to deliver a successful project for your client, leading to happy customers and a greater likelihood of them using your services again, or referring you more business in the future. As such, this is another way in which the right VA can help you to grow your business

Content

Content is extremely important for a growing business and can be what will potentially set you apart from competitors within your market, as such, having well-written, professional, valuable and engaging content for your website and social media in the form of company literature, blogs, news articles, e-books or guides is extremely important. Again, this is a very time consuming task which can often stay at the bottom of an entrepreneur or business owners’ to-do list, especially if you aren’t a confident writer or don’t have the time to sit down to research or write any content.  We have seen first-hand, how effective blog posts and interesting content can be in directing more visitors and potential clients to your website and, if you do keep on top of it, this can lead to increased business. If you struggle to keep on top of posting content, or struggle to find new content ideas, then this is something that a VA can be extremely useful for.  Many VAs within the current market will be well versed in creating content and, as such, will be able to help you with all your content needs and worries and enable you to cross this task off your to-do list each week.