5 Key Reasons to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Your Business
A virtual assistant is a person who works remotely to help run your business. These assistants are typically hired because they offer expertise in one specific area, such as customer support or social media management. But there are many reasons why hiring a virtual assistant could benefit your business in the future. Here are some reasons to consider adding a virtual assistant to your team.
1. Save Time & Money
Virtual assistants can take care of daily tasks like scheduling meetings (calendar management), managing email, taking notes during client calls, and even performing data entry. Because they work remotely, they can often do some of these things faster and cheaper than you can. For example, a virtual assistant might be able to schedule a meeting with someone across multiple locations while you can only meet face-to-face once per week. Or a virtual assistant might be better suited to perform data entry than you are, saving you precious hours each month.
2. Scale Quickly
Because virtual professionals are remote workers, it takes less time and effort to add additional ones to your team. If you find yourself struggling to keep up with demand, adding another virtual assistant can make a huge difference. And since they’re working remotely, they can start immediately without requiring training.
3. Grow Your Team Without Expanding Your Costs
Since virtual assistants aren’t employees, they don’t require benefits, payroll taxes, or health insurance. This makes it easier to grow your team without increasing costs. You can hire a few virtual assistants to handle basic tasks, and then expand your team as needed.
You’ll learn:
- What’s A Virtual Assistant?
- 5 reasons why you should consider adding a virtual assistant to your team
- When To Hire A Virtual Assistant For Your Company
- How To Manage Your Virtual Assistant
Ready to build your remote team?
Use the DigiWorks platform to hire, manage, and pay remote talent from all over the world.
What's A Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant is someone who helps businesses run smoothly by performing administrative tasks, customer service and more. These workers are usually remote, meaning they don’t have a physical presence in your offices. Instead, they provide support via phone, email, chat, video calls, text messages and even apps.
Virtual assistants are used by small businesses and large companies alike. In fact, there are even some people who make money by offering their services to clients online.
Their skills often include excellent communication skills and time management.
Here are examples of types of virtual assistants you might want to consider hiring:
- Customer Service Representatives
These workers typically answer customers’ questions about products and services. They’re often responsible for handling complaints, refunds and returns. These VAs usually have customer service experience and skill sets.
Due to their strong customer service skills, customer service representatives are great at helping customers feel comfortable with a product or service. And because they’re working remotely, they can easily offer 24/7 support.
- Administrative Assistant
These virtual professionals help out with the nitty gritty and admin tasks while you focus on business growth and work towards achieving your business goals. They also help out with daily operations tasks.
- Social Media Marketers
These virtual professionals manage the social media and communication channels of busy professionals and companies to manage their online presence.
- Content Writing
VAs can help out with all your content creation needs – all the content your business needs for its day operations. This includes writing the email copy for email management.
- Project management VAs
Some VAs or executive assistants are hired to help out with the list of tasks and common tasks involved in running projects.
Hiring a virtual assistant (VA) might seem expensive, but it could actually save you money over time. VAs are often associated with:
1. Increased Productivity
A VA can take care of mundane tasks while you focus on what you do best — growing your business. Whether it’s scheduling meetings, finding leads, managing social media accounts, or creating marketing campaigns, a VA can handle much of the work that takes up your time. In fact, according to FlexJobs, there are about 2 million people working as virtual assistants worldwide. And since most businesses don’t require employees to have specialized skills, there’s no shortage of talent looking for part-time jobs.
2. Saving Money
You’ll spend less time doing administrative work and more time focusing on the things that matter most to your business. Plus, you won’t need to pay someone else to manage email, book travel arrangements, or make copies. Instead, you can use those funds to invest in advertising, training, or paying yourself a salary.
3. Growing Your Brand Online
A VA can help you grow and improve your brand online by providing a range of services. From posting blog articles to responding to customer questions, a VA can help you establish a presence on social media and interact with potential clients. This helps you build trust and credibility among your audience, which is essential for success.
Here are five reasons why you should consider adding one to your team:
1. Reduced Costs
Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular among small businesses because they help save costs. They carry out a comprehensive list of tasks such as answering customer emails, scheduling appointments, booking travel arrangements, and performing data entry. This allows small businesses to avoid hiring full-time employees, saving both money and resources.
The biggest advantage of virtual assistants over traditional employees is that they require no upfront investment in equipment. IIn addition, virtual assistants do not require many of the benefits of in-person employees like retirement plans, etc.
Increased Productivity and Productive Time
Businesses often use virtual assistants to increase productivity. For example, some companies provide virtual assistants with access to their email accounts, allowing them to answer customers’ common questions while still being able to work on important projects. Other companies give virtual assistants access to their company’s calendar, allowing them to schedule meetings and book flights.
Improved Customer Service
Another benefit of virtual assistants is that they improve customer service. Business owners can use their time more efficiently by delegating certain tasks to an assistant for customer support/service, freeing up their time to focus on more important matters. When you have a designated assistant for customer support, customers receive better quality service and become loyal to the brand.
2. Increase Efficiency By Outsourcing Non-Core Tasks
Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular among small businesses. They help small businesses manage their day-to-day tasks and low value tasks without having to hire full-time employees. Here are three reasons why hiring a virtual assistant is beneficial to small businesses:
3. Scale Business Operations Quickly
Virtual assistants are a great way to expand your team rapidly while keeping costs low. They allow you to hire people on a project-by project basis, so you don’t have to worry about hiring full-time employees until you actually need to. This makes it easy to cope with sudden scope increases, such as during busy seasons. Once you’ve hired enough people, you can start gradually adding permanent hires.
You can also hire people on a freelance basis or part-time basis.
4. Offer 24/7 Customer Support Assistance/Customer Support
The virtual assistant revolution has arrived. Remote employees are saving busy professions time by taking care of tasks such as booking appointments, scheduling meetings, managing email, and providing general information. They can even answer questions about products and services.
Virtual assistants can help businesses make money while saving employees precious work hours. For example, a business could use a virtual assistant to provide live support to customers via phone, video calling, text messaging, social media, or email. This way, employees don’t have to spend hours answering customer inquiries. Instead, they can focus on growing the business.
A virtual assistant can handle routine tasks like bookings, payments, invoicing, and shipping as well as develop relationships with clients, building trust, and increasing sales. Customers will have more positive experiences.
Virtual assistants can also help businesses grow. If a company offers multiple services, offering a virtual assistant can increase brand awareness and improve customer satisfaction. Customers often prefer interacting with brands online because it gives them control over how they communicate with the company. Having a virtual assistant can give customers the impression that the company cares about them and wants to hear their feedback.
Finally, a virtual assistant can help businesses manage marketing campaigns. With a virtual assistant, marketers can schedule automated messages to send out at specific times throughout the day. They can also send emails or texts to people based on certain criteria. For instance, a marketer might want to remind people about upcoming holidays or special promotions.
In short, a virtual assistant can make life easier for both consumers and businesses.
5. Frees Up Time For Strategic Thinking
Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular. They allow people to use their voice to interact with technology without having to type anything out. These virtual assistants include Amazon Alexa, Apple HomePod, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Samsung Bixby. Some virtual assistants even offer free trials.
Freeing up time allows you and your team to focus on strategic planning and long-term goals. This frees up time because you don’t have to worry about mundane tasks anymore. You can spend more time thinking strategically and less time doing administrative work.
Think strategically about your business rather than just focusing on day-to-day tasks. When you think strategically, you’re able to make better decisions about how to allocate resources to maximize profits and minimize costs.
Ready to build your remote team?
Use the DigiWorks platform to hire, manage, and pay remote talent from all over the world.
When To Hire A Virtual Assistant For Your Company
There are many types of virtual assistants available today. Some are generalists, while others specialize in one area like customer support or marketing. You might even find yourself needing multiple VAs depending on how much work you want done. If you’re looking for help with something specific, it’s important to know what type of VA you need. Here are some things to consider when deciding whether hiring a virtual assistant is right for your company.
1. When You Have Work That Doesn’t Need A Full-Time Employee
If you’re working on projects that don’t require a full-time employee, it might make sense to outsource some of those tasks. There are plenty of people willing to do what you need done for less than $20/hour.
Hiring a virtual assistant is one way to save money while still getting things done. They can take care of scheduling, marketing, customer support, and many other administrative tasks.
Virtual assistants aren’t just for small businesses either. If you run a large operation, there could be dozens of people performing similar functions. Outsourcing allows you to focus on running your business without having to worry about the minutiae of managing payroll, benefits, taxes, etc.
You can hire VAs from around the world, including US-based virtual assistant and US-based executive assistants. However, VAs from North America are not the most affordable and don’t provide the lowest-cost virtual assistant services. Many businesses opt to hire VAs from other countries from around the world.
2. Hire A Virtual Assistant If You Don’t Want To Spend Money On Full-TimeEmployees
VAs are usually hired part-time, although some companies offer flexible schedules and hourly rates. Depending on how much work you need done, you can pay anywhere from $10-$50 per hour.
3. When There Are Repetitive And Non-Core Tasks
Virtual assistants can take over many types of tasks, including customer support, scheduling, data entry and research. They are especially useful for people who don’t want to spend hours every day doing things like answering emails, managing schedules, creating spreadsheets, or searching online databases. Instead, they can outsource those tasks to a virtual assistant.
A virtual assistant can handle anything from simple tasks like booking appointments, sending reminders, making travel arrangements, or even helping customers find products and services. For example, one study found that Amazon’s Alexa could answer questions about movies, restaurants, and shopping. Another study showed how a virtual assistant could help students manage homework assignments.
But there are still some limitations. While virtual assistants can perform certain tasks well, they cannot do everything. So it’s important to think carefully about what you’re outsourcing. You might consider asking yourself whether the task is something you’d normally do yourself, such as scheduling meetings or researching topics. If you decide to hire someone else to complete a task, make sure you understand exactly what you’re paying for. Some companies charge hourly rates, while others offer packages based on number of tasks completed per month.
How To Manage Your Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular among businesses. They help companies manage email, schedule meetings and handle customer support. But how do you know if it’s worth paying for one? Here are some tips for choosing the best virtual assistant tool for your needs.
1. Communication Tools
Messaging tools like Fleep and Slack are great platforms for communication with your virtual assistants. They make it easy to send messages to multiple people at once, even if they aren’t online. You can use them to communicate about projects, schedule tasks, and keep everyone up to date on what’s happening.
Video calling tools like Zoom and Skype allow you to host meetings and project reviews. They’re especially useful for remote teams where face-to-face collaboration isn’t possible. You can use them for one-on-one calls, group video conferences, and conference calls.
These tools will help you foster camaraderie among members of your virtual assistant team. If your virtual assistants work remotely, it’ll be easier for them to feel part of the same team if they can see each other regularly.
2. Performance Monitoring Tools
Performance monitoring tools are essential to any digital marketing strategy. They help you measure how well your campaign is performing against goals and objectives. You can use them to evaluate whether or not you’re reaching your target audience effectively.
Your performance metrics fall into three categories:
1. Key Performance Indicators – These are numbers that show whether or not you’re meeting your KPIs. This includes things such as conversions, bounce rates, and average session duration.
2. Goals – These are specific targets that you want to achieve within a certain period of time. For example, you might set a goal to increase conversion rates by 10% over the next 30 days.
3. Metrics – These are the actual measurements that you’ll use to track progress towards your goals. For example, you could use the number of visitors per day to gauge traffic growth.
You should monitor each metric individually, because it’s easy to become distracted by the big picture while focusing too much attention on one aspect of your campaign.
You can also measure the performance of your remote employees through software like time-tracking tools and project management tools.
Ready to build your remote team?
Use the DigiWorks platform to hire, manage, and pay remote talent from all over the world.
Hire a VA today
Using virtual assistant companies or virtual assistant marketplaces like DigiWorks is a great help when looking to hire a virtual assistant.
When hiring remote team members, the most important thing is that they are vetted. The DigiWorks platform helps business owners build their remote teams with 100% vetted VAs. Speak to us today to find out more!
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About DigiWorks
DigiWorks is an easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and start ups hire amazing remote talent from around the world. DigiWorks offers a way for you to hire, manage and pay people from all countries. If you find an amazing virtual assistant from Philippines, a content writer from Nigeria, or operations manager from South Africa – manage and pay your entire team from one platform with no hassle.
If you’re looking for a more affordable and sustainable option you might consider making use of a hiring platform like DigiWorks. Virtual assistant companies or platforms like DigiWorks are amazing as they not only match you with pre-vetted and assessed remote workers that can take care of all your business needs but they will also handle all onboarding and payroll needs as well.