Four Time Consuming Tasks You Can Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

If you are a business owner or senior manager, you probably have what feels like an endless list of tasks that you need to complete but haven’t had the time to do. When it comes to running a business, you no doubt want to be focusing on tasks that help boost sales, set you apart from competitors, market your brand, allow you to stay on top of figures and taxes and help make your internal processes more efficient. Business owners or senior managers often think that they need to bear the brunt of all these tasks and take them on by themselves, however, this is not the case.

There are many misconceptions concerning what Virtual Assistants (VAs) can help businesses and business owners with, and a lot of people believe that they are only there to assist with tasks such as email and diary management and booking of travel, but we are here to de-bunk those misconceptions. A VA can offer so much more and, as such, we have put together a list of time-consuming tasks that you can outsource to a VA, to help you maximise efficiency and focus on growing your business.

Social Media Management

With nearly half the world’s population regularly using social media platforms and 60% of Instagram users stating that they discover new products or companies on the platform, social media channels are a natural place to reach both new and existing customers. However, keeping on top of your social media can be a time-consuming task! Research by HubSpot has found that approximately 43% of small business owners spend around six hours per week focusing on social media, with 25% spending six to 10 hours per week. This is a huge amount of time that could be spent focusing on other core business activities, if you effectively outsource your social media to an experienced VA.

VAs can assist with creating social media pages for your business, updating information on social media platforms, finding relevant and interesting content to discuss and share on those platforms, managing and building a target audience on social media, as well as responding to customers and monitoring engagement. If you aren’t currently fully utilising social media and taking advantage of the benefits that it can have for your business, you are missing out on a fast, inexpensive and effective way to reach an enormous amount of people, so why not let your VA do it for you and let the positive effects speak for themselves?

Data Entry and Data Management

Data provides business owners and senior managers with the information necessary to run their businesses in the most profitable way possible. However, there is no denying the fact that data entry can often be a tedious and time-consuming task, which ultimately ends up taking a big chunk of your time away from undertaking the duties that only you, as a business owner or senior manager, can do. Bringing a VA on-board is a great way to delegate any data entry needs that your company has. A good VA can assist with a number of different data entry or management style tasks such as, checking that data is accurate, building up and maintaining databases, such as spreadsheets and CRM systems, generating reports from data, compiling data from surveys and updating company, client and customer records. Hiring a VA to assist you with tasks like this can help to ensure that your data is correct and up to date, which will go a long way to helping your business run smoothly.

Blog Writing

Blogging can be a brilliant way to market your business and bring on board new customers. HubSpot has found that companies who blog have around 55% more visitors to their website and 97% more inbound links than those who don’t . If you already have a blog in place on your website, but don't find it easy to write content, then you may spend hours attempting to write blog posts which are interesting, insightful and engaging, resulting in blogging becoming sporadic or even falling by the wayside. Alternatively, if you don’t currently have a blog but are looking to start one, again, it can take a great deal of time to get the wheels in motion.

However, blogging is yet another task that you can delegate to a VA, which will allow you to focus on the other, more strategic, aspects of your day-to-day job. A VA can help you to generate blog post ideas, set up and maintain a blog calendar, draft engaging blog posts, optimise the posts that are going out to ensure that your entries are being read by the right audience, and reply to comments on your behalf, saving you a great deal of time and allowing your business to reach a wider audience!

Bookkeeping and Accounting

Another task that business owners or senior managers spend a lot of precious hours on, and often dread, is keeping on top of their bookkeeping and accounting. Whether you are a multi-million-pound business tycoon or a self-employed mechanic working from your home garage, managing your own business finances can be the difference between success and failure. Bookkeeping and accounting is yet another task that can be effectively passed over to an experienced VA, following just a small amount of training. A VA with good bookkeeping and accounts experience can assist with ensuring that your bills are paid on time, reconciling credit card and bank statements, generating and sending invoices to clients and customers, preparing balance sheets and P&L accounts, maintaining financial data on software like Xero and chasing payment from clients and customers. Say goodbye to the dreaded accounts and hello to more time to grow your business!

Photo by Ana Azevedo on Unsplash.