8 ways to save time with a Virtual Assistant
As an entrepreneur or a small business owner (SBO), you understand better than most the value and scarcity of time. It might seem a familiar scenario to spend an entire day managing email, updating social media, entering data, and contacting clients or vendors, and realize that you've hardly made a dent in your to-do list. There just aren't enough hours in a day.
It might be time to consider delegating these day-to-day tasks to someone professional, organized, & detail oriented. Without the added expense of hiring a new employee, a virtual personal assistant can support you with any number of tasks or projects, freeing up more of your valuable time.
By outsourcing to a virtual assistant, you can concentrate on establishing, stabilizing, and growing your small business, rather than spending your time on email management, calendar management, data entry, any number of day-to-day tasks. At Approach HR & Virtual Services, we have plenty of experience in this area so, here are the top 8 ways we’ve seen our clients save time with a virtual assistant:
Administration
This first way is more of a category, as it contains many tasks with which a virtual personal assistant can help you or your small business. From data entry to email management to calendar management, administrative work is universal in any business setting, and it can significantly drain the time of an SBO who attempts to do it alone. Do yourself a favor: outsource event (virtual or in-person) planning, workshop registration, project management, and many other administrative responsibilities to a virtual assistant.
Research
In order to have an idea as to how your business can be successful, thorough analysis of market trends, rules and regulations, and new innovations in your field are a must. By outsourcing research to a virtual personal assistant, you guarantee that you won't spend hours of your valuable time pouring over technical documents, analyzing charts and graphs, or investigating a competitor's social media presence. Let your virtual assistant process the data for you and give you an abridged version to save time.
Web development
For your website to be the best representation of you and your business that it can be, it must be user-friendly, easy to navigate, and visually appealing. Any Content Management System can offer templates, but outsourcing the content management to a virtual assistant gives your website the chance to function as an expression of you and your business (even operating as an inbound salesperson), rather than a cookie-cutter billboard. Delegating in this way allows you to make time for other projects.
Writing
Clear and engaging communication is a must for an SBO, whether it be internal documents like emails and employee handbooks, or documents for the purchasing public in the form of press releases, website content, or user guides. But composing every form of written communication yourself is time consuming when your time may be more profitably used in other areas. Outsourcing writing projects to a virtual personal assistant ensures that your schedule can remain clutter free and lucrative.
Presentation
An engaging presentation is like any performance; it looks effortless because your audience of shareholders, civic leaders, or potential customers doesn't see the behind-the-scenes work. Turning your important information into a coherent presentation requires hours of preparation in the form of research and editing. A virtual assistant can help make your presentations more professional, while allowing you more time to enact the presentation's promises.
Sales assistance
Now that the administrative wheels of your small business are turning, research has been completed, a website has been developed, information has been conveyed in writing as well as in presentations, it's time for the real business of business: sales. A virtual personal assistant can support you with composing lists of leads and prospects, updating their records, preparing proposals and contracts, logging orders and issuing invoices, and ensuring that your small business is a successful one.
Marketing
If sales is a song, then marketing is a microphone, amplifying your small business message, service, or product line to more people further away. Creating marketing material, such as email newsletters or mailers, is time consuming, as is the campaign management.
Social media management
As soon as you flipped the sign on your door to "Open," your business became a social entity, and its social presence is how it interacts with the public. By writing tweets, composing Instagram messages, and posting on Facebook, your virtual personal assistant can increase your social media visibility. But social behaviors aren't only online. Some potential or current clients may appreciate a classic holiday card or thank-you note, which your virtual assistant can help compose.
The way you treat your time has a direct correlation to the success of your small business. By outsourcing your day-to-day tasks to a professional, organized, and detail-oriented virtual personal assistant, you can not only prevent the waste of time, but you can change the way you spend time, which allows you to save time, making time for your small business' other needs. Or, on the rarest of occasions, maybe make some time for yourself.
You earned it.