Even in the digital age, business is still fundamentally about personal relationships. Many businesses still rely on word-of-mouth and customer referrals to grow their business. While the need to develop personal relationships cannot be ignored, neither can the changes in how people search for and evaluate products and services. If customers have difficulty finding you online, you’re missing out on business opportunities. But building an online presence requires familiarity with digital marketing activities such as social media, search engine optimization, online advertising and content creation. Many small business owners don’t have this specialized background, and don’t have the time and resources required to build an online presence. Hiring a virtual assistant is a cost-effective and productive way to delegate your business’ marketing so you can focus on running your company.

Digital Marketing Tasks to Delegate to a Virtual Assistant

• Blog Management.
  You probably have a lot of great ideas for blogs, but not a lot of time to write them. Putting together a proper blog requires research, drafting, finding images to go along with blogs, editing and more. This is a perfect marketing task to delegate to a virtual assistant who has blogging, writing or content marketing experience. Let your VA know what kind of content you expect them to produce and on what schedule. In the beginning, you’ll want to stay involved and monitor their writing before publishing, but eventually you may be able to let them take over the blog completely. You can also use your virtual assistant to draft and submit guest blogs on your behalf to help increase your SEO, visibility, and online reputation.

• Social Media.
  As a small business, being on social media is incredibly important. But productive and beneficial social media use requires regular and personalized posts and interactions, which many business owners don’t have time to do themselves. Instead of trying to squeeze in a bit of social media here and there when you have time, turn to a virtual assistant for help. Give your VA access to all your current social media platforms and determine a posting schedule for each platform. Inform your VA of who your target audience is for each social network, and let them know the kind of content you’d like to see posted. Use scheduling software like Hootsuite to set up drip campaigns. Make sure your VA also links back to your blog posts and guest blogs for additional visibility.

• Search Engine Optimization.
  It has been said that “The best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google”. The sentiment is absolutely true. If your business cannot be found by Googling key terms, you might as well not exist. With all the competition for valuable Google real estate, it can be difficult to get your site ranked anywhere  near the top. Search engine optimizing your website is a critical way to make your website searchable and rank higher. Given the complex process and secrecy around Google’s search algorithm, getting a marketing virtual assistant who is knowledge about SEO is of critical importance.
  

• Email Campaigns.
  Whether you’ve been meaning to compile a list of prospects to email or have been wanting to create and send out a monthly newsletter, your VA can take over all your email campaigns for you. Share the lists you have begun building and have your VA add to them on a regular basis. You can also use your virtual assistant to create newsletters, marketing emails, call to action buttons, and landing pages for other email campaigns. Most importantly, have your VA track and report the incoming statistics from all your marketing email campaigns.

Marketing is a fundamental building block for companies small and large, old and new. Because it is so important, handing it off can feel quite daunting. However, if you select the right virtual assistant, the process of successfully integrating a VA into your small business operations will be far less painful and difficult than you think, and will reap some serious productivity, time management, and commerce benefits for you and your organization.