At Outsourcing Angel, we’ve had the privilege of matchmaking many Beauty and Cosmetics businesses with Virtual Assistants and watching those relationships flourish through the years. And with time, we’ve figured out the vital formula to business growth for both small and large business owners when it comes to outsourcing admin, social media and more.
So let’s show you a real life example from one of our long-term clients, Lash Tribe, the world’s #1 lash academy and eyelash extension business that operates out of Brisbane, Australia. With our help, Julia Mann (Founder of Lash Tribe) was matched with Desiree Sunga, a Marketing Virtual Assistant in the Philippines.
Together, Julia and Desiree have accelerated Lash Tribe into a top-tier lash extension consulting business and reached over seven digits in revenue. We want to dive deep into their story and show you how to grow a business in the beauty industry and how hiring a Virtual Assistant can make that happen.
Watch the interview with Desiree hosted by Founder of Outsourcing Angel, Linh Podetti, and find out about how she helped grow this local beauty business into a global powerhouse:
Real-life example of a Beauty Business and a Marketing Virtual Assistant
Say hello to Marketing Virtual Assistant Desiree!
Desiree is a highly experienced Social Media and Marketing Virtual Assistant from a small town called Dumaguete City in the Philippines. She studied Nursing in University and became a registered nurse, before she gave birth to her daughter at the age of 21.
This prompted Desiree to change her life. She needed a work-life balance to stay home and look after her daughter while making a comfortable living. Through a friend’s recommendation, Desiree put her English skills to use and started getting freelance jobs as a Virtual Copywriter which was just the beginning of her virtual career.
After years of experience building up her portfolio of work with a range of clients, Desiree expanded her skills with Social Media and Marketing in hopes that she would soon find a job with more stability and certainty. In 2017, Desiree applied to work at Outsourcing Angel as a Virtual Assistant and she has been a valued employee with us ever since!
Meet the Beauty Business Owner, Julia!
Julia is a highly successful entrepreneur, speaker, judge, author, and award-winning lash artist. She has been in the beauty business for over 15 years and now runs Lash Tribe, a highly successful lash academy with students from all over the country and the world.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Julia. Several years ago, she struggled with a work life balance and found herself sacrificing time with her two kids by spending ridiculously long hours at work. After realising that she could no longer continue the business this way, she took time to realign her beauty business and make some changes. One change she made was hiring Desiree as a Virtual Assistant to help her with administrative, graphic design and social media tasks.
The Desiree and Julia Effect
Julia approached us at Outsourcing Angel a few years ago, hungry to take her eyelash business to the next level. After learning about all of Julia’s business needs and getting to know her work style and preferences, we quickly realised that Desiree was precisely the kind of Virtual Assistant that Julia was looking for.
We on-boarded Desiree with Julia and helped them set-up an ideal Virtual Assistant system and process for their virtual partnership. Today, the two have done amazing things at Lash Tribe, turning it into a global phenomenon that continues to grow and scale exponentially.
The best part? Julia now has more time to spend with her husband and kids because her Marketing Virtual Assistant Desiree can run the business even when she isn’t around!
What Desiree Does for Lash Tribe as a Marketing Virtual Assistant
The key to Desiree and Julia’s long-time work partnership stems from Desiree’s transition from being solely task-orientated to a Virtual Assistant that takes initiative and can make decisions on behalf of Julia. This is how Desiree breaks it down for us to help you understand how to make the most out of working with a Marketing Virtual Assistant for your beauty and cosmetics business:
- Manage the Facebook Business Page:
- Desiree looks after creating, sourcing and scheduling the Facebook posts on Lash Tribe’s Facebook page
- Desiree responds to all incoming Direct Messages, post comments and page reviews
- Thanks to Facebook Management and Engagement, the Facebook page has grown to over 42,000 followers
- Manage Facebook Groups:
- Julia has an active Facebook Group with a large community of people who want to become professional lash artists. Desiree is the moderator of this group and reviews all join requests.
- Desiree moderates the Facebook Group posts from community members
- Desiree assists Julia with updating the Facebook Page with important messages, videos and announcements
- Graphic Design:
- Desiree creates basic graphic designs for: social media posts and stories, blog banners, email banners and training material using tools like Canva
- Podcast Posting:
- Julia connects with her community, clients, and potential students through her podcast. This is where Desiree assists by scheduling the podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
- Desiree uploads the video version of the podcast to YouTube and adds all the relevant descriptions, tags and video cards.
- Desiree also designs the promotional material for the podcasts using tools like Canva
- Email Management:
- Desiree manages all of Julia’s incoming and outgoing emails as her Admin Virtual Assistant
- This involves sending follow-ups and organising appointments
But most importantly, Desiree is there to help Julia when she needs time off from work. Whether it’s a vacation or more quality time with her family, she can take a much-needed breather knowing that Desiree can look after the business while she’s away. This is a result of building a deep level of mutual trust between the beauty business owner and Virtual Assistant.
Looking for a Marketing Virtual Assistant like Desiree?
Chat to our Outsourcing Specialist about your social media needs and we’ll help you find the perfect Virtual Assistant to fit seamlessly into your business.
How to grow your Beauty Business with a Beauty Virtual Assistant
When hiring a Virtual Assistant for beauty professionals, what can a Virtual Assistant do to grow the business? Here are a few strategies that have yielded some great results for Julia and Desiree that might be helpful for you to consider if you want a Beauty Virtual Assistant to grow your beauty business too:
1. Create an online brand
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses were forced to shift their businesses towards working remotely and a heavy focus on their Digital Marketing Strategy to stay afloat. It was clear that businesses that lacked a strong online presence would struggle to stay open.
Turning your beauty and cosmetics business into an online brand can take time, but it’s incredibly worth it. The key to this is consistency in the following:
- Posting and sharing valuable social media content
- Having a clear and consistent brand message throughout all your online platforms. This includes everything from your tone of voice to your brand aesthetic (brand colors, graphic design styles, and themes)
- Developing a strong relationship between your brand and your audience by being responsive, engaging and available
- Consistently engaging with other pages and online influencers
These are the types of tasks that you can easily outsource to a Marketing Virtual Assistant while you can focus on high-value tasks and growing your client base.
2. Provide value to others
There are three ways your beauty business can build customer trust and loyalty online — you can either entertain, educate, or inspire your audience through value-adding content.
Don’t be afraid to give out excellent content for free online such as:
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Templates
- Worksheets
- Training videos
- Online courses
As long as you work with your Virtual Assistant to create and share valuable and shareable content, you can position your brand as an industry leader and naturally grow your reach too.
Desiree regularly assists Julia in creating online training materials for her Facebook community as well as posting blog articles to her website to assist the audience that are in the ‘research phase’. Without regularly sharing and updating valuable content, how will you prove to your leads that you can address their needs?
3. Build systems and close the loop
A brand will get you awareness, but a system will help you convert that into actual results and company growth. At Outsourcing Angel, we believe in the power of systems to get things done so we have a system for practically anything— project management, marketing, operations, communication, and so on.
Let’s take a look at our Lead Generation process as an example. Instead of separating our lead generation activities from our marketing initiatives, we have a process and system of managing our warm and cold leads. This is something that a beauty business can easily set-up with the help of a Virtual Assistant.
1. Leads download free content from our website
2. They’re added to our email database where our Virtual Assistant creates regular email campaigns to convert these leads into enquiries
3. Our Virtual Assistant will also follow these leads on social media and regularly engage and/or share their content to stay connected and top of mind
4. Our Virtual Assistant will collect further research information to assist us in improving our lead generation efforts with leads. This includes the following:
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- What pages are they following?
- What groups are they active in?
- What type of posts are they engaging with?
- Are they following any of our competitors?
- When are they most active online?
5. We can then create remarketing campaigns targeting the following:
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- The list of leads based on their email addresses
- Lookalike audiences to these leads
- A new target audience based on the research from step 4.
Our leads are then captured and managed in our CRM tool, Hubspot, where our Virtual Assistants will regularly update with any new information about the leads and move leads up a funnel until they become happy clients.
4. Be open to getting help!
Don’t be stuck in the “it’s better/faster if I do it myself” mentality! To grow your beauty business, you’ll need extra helping hands to allow you to focus your time and effort into the bottom-line of your business.
Most small business owners might think that they don’t have the resources to hire a Virtual Assistant. But we need to start shifting that mindset and think of hired help as valuable business investment. By getting a Marketing Virtual Assistant for your beauty business, you can achieve more, build more, create more, and sell more.
What makes a relationship between a Beauty Business Owner and Marketing Virtual Assistant successful?
The next thing you’ll need to understand to work well with a Virtual Assistant is how to motivate them and nurture a long-lasting relationship. In the recent interview with our Marketing Virtual Assistant, Desiree, she shared three critical elements to a strong working relationship with a beauty Virtual Assistant:
1. Mutual trust with your Virtual Assistant
After working with Desiree for many years now, Julia has built such a high level of trust for her Virtual Assistant. As time went on, Julia began to handover more aspects of the business to Desiree allowing her to take on more work and responsibility.
But it’s not enough to just say that you trust your Virtual Assistant. You have to show it. This means investing time and energy into initial training, making time for feedback to come from both sides and allowing your Virtual Assistant to work without micro-managing them.
This might be scary at first, but our team is here to hold your hand every step of the way! In fact, with each Virtual Assistant, we assign an experienced Team Leader to oversee the quality of your Virtual Assistant’s work and conduct regular check-ins to make sure business is starting off on the right foot.
2. Build an environment that encourages proactiveness
Once you’ve developed that wonderful mutual trust with your Virtual Assistant, it’ll allow your Virtual Assistant the confidence and capabilities to be a proactive staff member.
Instead of relying on you to give them all the prompts and detailed instructions, your Virtual Assistant shouldn’t be reliant on their manager to constantly follow-up and assign work. Instead they should be able to:
- Make valuable suggestions: Desiree would take it upon herself to do her own research when Julia provided directions for something that she didn’t have step-by-step instructions for. Proving that the saying “two heads are better than one” is certainly true!
- Offering additional support: Desiree exemplified this by making suggestions and asking Julia if she needed support with anything outside her work scope.
- Be self-sufficient in day-to-day tasks: After your Virtual Assistant has had enough practice, they should be able to understand what is expected of them from their day-to-day tasks and make time for this without your prompts. For Desiree, this includes things like: How to respond to incoming emails, how often to moderate Facebook Group Pages and coming up with social media designs to suit the business.
When Virtual Assistants are proactive, it allows for more results in an organisation. It also removes the burden from the business owner or manager to constantly chase after Virtual Assistants and give them work to do just to keep them preoccupied.
3. Rewards and praise
Julia went over and beyond to provide Desiree with surprise bonuses and special gifts on her birthdays or special occasions like Christmas. In the interview with Desire, she shared that her motivation as a Marketing Virtual Assistants is more than just the money, these gestures that make her feel appreciated gives her motivation because she knows that her work did not go unnoticed.
This is why at Outsourcing Angel, we also make sure we show our Virtual Assistants that they’re loved and appreciated in the following ways:
- Providing a prepaid health care card
- Surprising Virtual Assistants with birthday, anniversary and other gifts
- Hosting virtual games with bonuses and rewards
- Throwing online birthday parties and baby showers
- Celebrating our wins together with prizes and rewards
- Giving points to other staff members and recognising the great work that they do
- Hosting annual company trips as a holiday reward for all of our staff
If you’re currently running a beauty and cosmetics business, think about all the ways you can give back to your staff to make them feel appreciated too, even your Virtual Assistants!
Beauty Businesses moving into the Digital Age
Experts say that we are now moving into what we call the digital age, a time marked by digital innovations like service as software, e-commerce, and massive globalisation. The beauty industry isn’t separate from this move as it has also experienced massive digital shifts. However, if your business isn’t part of that shift, there’s a chance you could get left behind.
And one aspect of riding the digital shift is adopting a virtual work arrangement. Working with a Virtual Assistant can help you achieve that and more. So after listening to the story of Lash Tribe, Julia, and Desiree, it’s time you start thinking about this— do you want your business to adapt and thrive or get left behind?
To get ahead of the curve and jump into the digital revolution as a beauty business, talk to us today, and we would love to help you out on your journey to shifting your business online with the help of a Virtual Assistant! You can book a discovery call with us here.
Let’s grow your Beauty Business with a Virtual Assistant!
Chat to our Outsourcing Specialist about your business needs and we’ll help you find the perfect Virtual Assistant for the job!
