9 Tasks To Delegate to a Virtual Assistant
Having a virtual assistant is a must for many busy professionals. An extra set of hands ready to take on any tasks that help get the essential jobs done gives you a massive advantage in the smooth running of a business. Virtual assistants help entrepreneurs and company leaders take their businesses to the next level and increase profits.
Virtual assistants are often assigned time-consuming duties and responsibilities that distract the professionals from their core business functions. Specific tasks save business leaders so much time when delegated to a virtual assistant.
Let’s dig all in and go over the top duties to assign to your virtual assistant to free up some time and focus on what you do best.
Best Tasks To Delegate to a Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants typically handle administrative activities needed for the business to run smoothly. There are specific jobs that are super beneficial to assign to your virtual assistant. Here are the best tasks to delegate to a virtual assistant:
1. Email Management
Most people don’t realize how much time we spend reading and responding to emails. Of course, some emails are essential for business. However, many emails are just a colossal waste of time for a busy professional with little benefit for the success of their company.
When delegating tasks to a virtual assistant, email management should be near the top of the list, especially if you spend hours a day reading, rereading, and replying to emails. It’s just not a good use of valuable time and can be a big distraction throughout the day.
A virtual assistant can manage emails on your behalf, including replying to any they can handle successfully. They can send you emails that you should respond to or copy you on any that you should be aware of.
It’s an excellent way to get this time-consuming but necessary duty completed to free up your time to focus on more pressing activities.
2. Calendar Management
The old saying “time is money” is true in some aspects of running a business. However, working smarter with the time you have is where you get the most benefits. We all run on human time, but it’s essential in business to accurately manage what meetings you need to attend and which appointments you have scheduled.
Calendar management is a task to delegate to a virtual assistant to ensure you don’t miss the important stuff. The virtual assistant will ensure you’re never double booked and your days run smoothly and on time.
Virtual assistants will book appointments and meetings for you and reschedule when needed. They will keep your calendar up to date without much effort on your part. Don’t worry about being out of the loop.
With a shared calendar, you’ll always stay up-to-date with your schedule with a few clicks of the mouse.
3. Social Media
As we all know, social media is part of millions of people's everyday lives. Today, people of all ages and demographics use different social media platforms. It’s crucial to be active and interactive on social media to keep your business alive in the eyes of consumers. Really, it’s an excellent marketing tool.
Customers and prospects often go to businesses' social media pages to gain information about a company. Sometimes individuals contact companies via social media for inquiries on their products or services.
Sometimes customers go through social media for service. Many consumers make their buying decisions based on a business’s social media pages, so it’s critical to have compelling content and available help when needed.
Social media management is a great task to delegate to a virtual assistant since it needs daily attention and strategic thinking. Customers and prospects see what you post on your business social pages, so you want to be sure it’s drawing them in and building affinity for your brand rather than causing churn.
There will be times customers reach out for service via social media. When you have your virtual assistant managing your social media, you have a dedicated person ready to service your clients and help build a positive image for your brand.
4. Data Entry
Data entry is time-consuming and tedious and an excellent task to delegate to a virtual assistant. While data entry is sometimes needed to keep the business running, it’s not a task that directly adds to your growth.
Rather than spending your limited and valuable time completing data entry projects, you can send the work over to your virtual assistant to complete and free yourself from the mundane job.
Data entry includes order entry, creating and maintaining spreadsheets, and more. When these tedious tasks come up, you can share the files with your virtual assistant so they can get to work on it, and you can consider it done.
5. Graphic Design
When running a business, there are always times when graphic design work is needed. It’s an excellent task to delegate to your virtual assistant since they know your brand and the image you want to portray.
When interviewing potential virtual assistants, look for one with graphic design experience, as it’s a huge asset to have them on your team. Virtual assistants with graphic design experience can quickly design up most of your business design needs, including:
- Logo design
- Brochure design
- Website design
- Newsletter design
- Online ad designs such as banners, remarketing ads, and headers
- Social media ad posts
- Presentations
- Postcards, flyers, and other print marketing pieces
6. Customer Service
If you have a small or start-up business with not a ton of customer service work yet, it’s a great task to delegate to a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant can answer calls, emails, SMS, online chat, and social media customer service inquiries.
Of course, once your business starts booming, and customer support inquiries increase, it will be time to hire a team to handle the job to ensure your clients get the excellent personalized service they expect.
You never want to let your customer service slip through the cracks as it will negatively affect your business, and your revenue can easily decrease fast.
Your virtual assistant can solve your customers' issues and answer any questions about your products or services.
Your virtual assistant can also upsell & cross-sell to drive more revenue. Providing exceptional customer care is a great way to increase retention, so delegating it to a virtual assistant means there’s a dedicated person ready to deliver first-class service.
7. Administrative Tasks
To run a business effectively, there are many administrative tasks needed to get done daily. Since most are time-consuming and repetitive, they’re great tasks to delegate to a virtual assistant.
Depending on your business, your administrative needs will vary, but most of them your virtual assistant can handle successfully. Rather than getting bogged down with these tasks and taking away from critical activities and growth strategies, assign administrative jobs to your assistant.
Virtual assistants can complete a variety of administrative tasks. Some virtual assistants can also handle light bookkeeping work, which will save so much time and probably save a lot of money. Virtual assistants can also tackle administrative tasks such as:
- Answering phones
- Report creation
- Accounts receivable
- Creating slideshows and spreadsheets
- Create training material
- Customer follow-ups
8. Research and Writing
If you want to stay in the know and understand what your competition is up to and the industry is doing, you must do some digging and research every now and then. It saves you so much time if you delegate the task to a virtual assistant.
You may need to research particular products or vendors, which can be time-consuming. Your virtual assistant can do any kind of research you need to stay on the up and up and provide you with a report of their findings.
If you need a paper written, your virtual assistant can quickly write it to save you time. You can delegate any of these detailed projects to a virtual assistant and just approve anything that gets sent out or published.
If you have written a document, you can pass it off to your virtual assistant to proofread for you to ensure there are no grammatical or spelling errors. Because mistakes happen, but errors on papers are not a good look, especially for a business.
9. Marketing Management
In most successful companies, you will find a marketing manager. A dedicated person that focuses on getting the brand in front of as many people as possible with creative ads that draw them in. Marketing management is an excellent task to delegate to a virtual assistant.
Your virtual assistant can shop for marketing vendors and work directly with them to set up and manage ads. They can negotiate pricing for your company to ensure you’re getting top-of-the-line marketing for a fair price.
Your virtual assistant will handle this labor-intensive yet critical job to ensure your marketing efforts pay off in the form of cold hard revenue. Your virtual assistant can oversee your ads and track the results, so more marketing dollars go into the ads that convert and pull out of those that don’t.
After all, effective marketing is not cheap, so you must track well to avoid huge losses and only have big gains. Having your virtual assistant on the job is a great advantage and saves you stress and worry.
Conclusion
When thinking about tasks to delegate to a virtual assistant, consider these nine to save time and increase revenue. A virtual assistant will take many of your time-consuming and tedious duties off your plate so you can focus on your core business functions and growth.
Your virtual assistant can handle your customer service needs until the business is booming, and then a team is needed to meet the demands and satisfy your customer’s needs effectively and quickly.
Are you ready to hire a virtual assistant to improve efficiency and increase productivity? If so, contact Awesome CX today, and we’ll show you how it’s done effectively.
Sources:
The 7 Sneaky Ways You're Losing Time Through Email Each Day | Inc.com