The Marketing VA Guide: What Can a Marketing Virtual Assistant Do for Managers

When marketing trends and social media algorithms are constantly changing, do you find it hard to keep up with all your deliverables as a Marketing Manager? Well, what if you had extra helping hands from a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant? It may just revolutionise the way you work.

A recent survey showed that up to 82% of creative professionals in Content Marketing have noticed a significant increase in their daily workload. This is because people are consuming online content at a more rapid rate than ever before, so the churn of content has accelerated over the past few years. This is why many Marketing Managers are now realising the true benefits of hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant.

Recently, CEO & Founder of Outsourcing Angel, Linh Podetti, interviewed our Marketing Manager, Annie, about what exactly a Marketing Virtual Assistant can do to help Managers achieve more efficiency and better results. Watch the full interview below or keep reading to get an overview of:

• Common problems Marketing Managers face
• Tasks you can outsource to a Marketing Virtual Assistant
• Advantages of hiring a Marketing Virtual Assistant
• Tips for Marketing Managers (before you get started!)

Common Problems Marketing Managers Face

Before we get into specific Marketing Virtual Assistant tasks, it’s important to address the common problems that many Marketing Managers face today and how these issues manifest at work and beyond. Most Marketing Managers struggle with these four main problems all the time:

1. Creative blocks
Marketing Managers are creative at heart, but those creative juices need time to replenish and refill! This means allowing yourself time to switch-off in between all the project management, social media strategies, marketing campaigns, research, reporting and day-to-day administrative tasks.

Unfortunately, most of the time there’s just not enough time in the day to ‘do it all’ and it’s easy to fall into a ‘creative block’ because you just don’t have the time and brain capacity to think outside of the box.

2. Lack of focus
You’ve heard of the term ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ right? Well, being a Marketing Manager involves so many moving parts – juggling all the different social media platforms is already a task in itself! This is why lacking focus can easily become an issue for Marketing Managers, especially those who don’t have the resources of a Marketing team to assist.

3. Finding the right tools
Trello, Basecamp, Asana, Monday, Loom, Zoom, Slack, Hubspot, WordPress, Google Drive… the list keeps going on and on!

As a Marketing Manager, there are so many tools to manage. A typical day usually involves using a project management tool, social media content scheduler, CRM, hashtag research tool, website analytics and more.

When you struggle to use all the tools or you don’t have time to research the best solutions for your marketing needs, it ends up being a cumbersome or manual task that ironically lowers the effectiveness of your campaigns and efforts.

4. Burning out
What all of this ultimately results in is burning out. When you’ve got too much on your plate or wasting time doing things that aren’t your strength, like graphic design or video editing, it becomes an overwhelming process. This is why so many Marketing Managers end up throwing in the towel and leaving their jobs.

So when you’re dealing with all of these problems, what’s the best solution? At Outsourcing Angel, we’ve personally witnessed how a Virtual Marketing Assistant can be a real game-changer for Marketing Managers – so let’s talk about what that could look like for you.

Tasks to outsource to a Marketing Virtual Assistant

So what do Virtual Assistants do? Many Marketing Managers we work with, outsource tasks to our Filipino Virtual Assistants based on the following traits:

• Strong communication skills
• Proficient in written and verbal English
• Attention to details
• Highly organised
• Advanced administration skills
• Works well in both team environment and autonomously
• Can work in the client’s desired timezone
• Experienced in Marketing and Social Media

In addition to this, we only hire Marketing Virtual Assistants from our trusted talent pool (read more about how we hire our VAs here) and some of the most common we hire for include:

1. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Social Media Management

Outsourcing social media tasks can be one of the biggest time savers for Marketing Managers. Having a Virtual Assistant manage your social media schedule means that you can outsource the following tasks:

• Design and source social media content (Canva, Photoshop)
• Basic video editing (iMovie, inShot)
• Manage social media schedule/calendar
• Schedule social media posts
• Improve online presence
• Respond to messages and comments
• Manage Facebook Groups
• Schedule YouTube videos
• Upload Instagram and Facebook stories
• LinkedIn lead generation
• Update social media reports
• Social media research
• Pinning and uploading posts to Pinterest

To give you a real-life example, here’s the story of one of our long-term clients and CEO of social media agency Launch Lab Media, Simon Shearer. Prior to working with us, Simon was juggling all of his marketing deliverables on top of managing his client relationships.

In an attempt to streamline his workload, he hired an unreliable freelancer from UpWork that unfortunately ended up costing him even more time and money.

Simon then decided to enlist the help of Outsourcing Angel and we matched him with our Social Media Virtual Assistant, Aya. For the past 2 years, Aya has been working full-time with Simon on the following marketing tasks:

• Managing social media calendars
• Creating social media content
• Liaising with Graphic Designers and Video Editors
• Accounts Management (reviewing and approving accounts, issuing refunds, requests and reminders)
• Managing subscriptions
• Managing customer enquiries

“I’ve been able to remove myself from these tasks. Meaning, I can manage client relationships, and the clients’ overall marketing strategies to get them results, rather than having my head down just doing a lot of the groundwork. So she’s been great!”
– Simon Shearer, CEO Launch Lab Media

2. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Content Creation

Content creation doesn’t just stop at designing graphics for social media, it also involves:
Writing social media captions, video descriptions and blog articles

• Researching Instagram hashtags
• Designing email campaigns
• Designing social media banners, blog banners, infographics and Instagram Story templates
• Updating website content
• Preparing video transcriptions
• Basic video editing

These are all projects you can easily outsource to a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant. The only task you’ll have to do is to review and approve the work or provide further feedback and your VA can take care of the rest.

In fact, here are some work samples from our Social Media Virtual Assistant, Desiree, to give you a preview of the type of content a VA can assist you with:

Blog Banner

Instagram Stories

Hashtag Research

3. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Lead Generation and Sales

Lead generation is an area that falls in between the Marketing and Sales Department. While the Sales Team can manage their own outreach, Marketing should still invest time and resources into an effective Lead Generation Strategy to close the loop between all the online enquiries and subscribers.

A really great strategy we implemented last year at Outsourcing Angel, was our LinkedIn Lead Generation plan with a Marketing Virtual Assistant.

Essentially, every time we collected a new email subscriber or website enquiry lead, our Marketing Virtual Assistant would connect with this person and their company’s page on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

This allowed our Marketing Virtual Assistant to actively comment and stay in touch with these leads by:

• Liking, commenting and sharing their social media posts
• Joining similar LinkedIn Groups
• Contributing useful information to these LinkedIn Groups
• Initiate a conversation via Direct Message (only when relevant)

This activity eventually resulted in the conversion of some of our most valuable clients. It’s definitely a great example of an ‘outside-the-box’ lead generation strategy that we wouldn’t be able to implement without the assistance of a Virtual Marketing Assistant.

4. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Executive and Administration

Admin Virtual Assistants are highly requested and Marketing Managers can benefit from having a Marketing Virtual Assistant that can take on the admin work too. This includes the following tasks:

• Database management
• Follow-ups & reminders
• Data entry, transcription
• Project management – schedule, templates creation, etc
• Email and calendar management
• Booking appointments and making travel arrangements
• Creating, storing and organising documents
• Creating presentations
• PDF conversion, splitting & merging
• Basic bookkeeping
• Invoicing & payment reminders
• Sending special occasion greetings (birthdays, anniversaries)
• Organising eCards and gifts
• Transcribing meeting minutes

These are the types of repetitive tasks that are essential to the day-to-day running of the business, but can impact your work efficiency and marketing deliverables. Without a Marketing Virtual Assistant to take on these tasks, you’ll end up being the bottleneck of your business.

5. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Website Management

What do people see when they visit your website? Hopefully, a well-designed, and well-maintained page with lightning speed loading time! ⚡

Hiring a Virtual Assistant to manage these basic website tasks can free-up Marketing Managers up from things like:

• Updating site plugins
• Scheduling blog posts
• Updating website products
• Updating site information
• Designing website banners

Outsourcing these tasks can be particularly important for businesses that don’t have a dedicated website developer.

6. Marketing Virtual Assistant Task: Client Support Management

Having great client support and response time ensures happy customers and more referrals. So having a Virtual Assistant to take care of incoming enquiries at a superb level will set your brand up for customer loyalty and lifetime value.

The client support tasks that a Marketing Virtual Assistant can also assist you with includes:

• Responding to customer emails and support tickets
• Sending follow-up emails and reminders
• Adding content to your FAQs
• Updating CRM with customer information
• Compiling reports and feedback about customer satisfaction

As long as you fully equip your Virtual Assistant to know everything about your brand and communication style, you’ll have a great customer support representative on your side!

Advantages of Hiring a Virtual Assistant for Marketing

So what are the advantages in hiring a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant? Here are the stand-out advantages based on businesses that have successfully built an offshore team of Virtual Assistants to streamline their workload.

More time to allocate to Marketing Strategy and Research

When Marketing Managers let go of repetitive and time-consuming tasks, they can allocate more time to thinking of strategies, something that actually brings more results many times than actual execution.

With more time for strategy, you’ll be in the headspace to improve on your marketing strategy, brand and catch-up on competitor and trend research too.

Learn and develop your skills

There’s an anecdote of two boys who were pulling water out of the well. One wanted to do more so he started going faster. But the faster he went, the faster he got tired. The other boy focused on going at the same pace but getting a bigger bucket. Who do you think worked smarter?

In Marketing, our knowledge is our “bucket,” and we need to expand that by learning and upskilling. When a Marketing Manager outsources and rededicates time to learning, growth will only come naturally— both for the manager and the company.

Increase collaboration

Getting an Online Marketing Virtual Assistant on its own is a huge win because we get to add someone who can pitch in on the planning and ideation processes. “Two heads are better than one,” is what the old adage says, and that’s so true in Marketing too.

With an additional person to provide insight and perspective on an idea or campaign, Marketing Managers get someone to bounce ideas off when they’re coming up with new ways to build a brand or promote a product or service.

Experience work-life balance

Tapping into Virtual Assistant Marketing services doesn’t just improve a Marketing Manager’s work. It also affects their whole lives too. Think of the number of hours overtime that a Marketing Manager has to clock in to get things done. What usually gets sacrificed is his or her time outside of work.

With more hands to get things done, Marketing Managers can now experience more work-life balance and get the chance to unplug when the workday is done or the weekend comes. Nothing solves professional burn-out better than creating work boundaries. Outsourcing work makes that more attainable

Deliver better results

When all is said and done, experiencing all the above benefits will have a significant impact on the company’s results, even the bottom line. When Marketing Managers get to strategise more, learn more, collaborate more, and even rest more, the company will eventually benefit from all that by getting higher conversions and even more sales.

There’s no doubt that hiring a Social Media Virtual Assistant will take time and cost money, but considering the amount of time that it gives back to Marketing Managers or even entrepreneurs and business owners to focus on self-improvement, high-yield work, networking, and even self-care, it’s a cost that will bring an immense amount of value in return.

Also, many times, hiring a Virtual Assistant can help you become more productive and lead to more sales and profit, offsetting the costs plus a whole lot more. We can’t count the number of times that clients have come to us and reported a significant amount of sales increase in their companies after hiring a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant.

Tips for Marketing Managers who want to hire a Marketing Virtual Assistant (before you start!)

Before hiring any new staff, you’ll need to set-up the necessary processes, systems and resources to successfully on-board with a long-term Virtual Assistant. Here are our top tips on what you’ll need to have in place before you start hiring.

1. Learn how to delegate

When talking to Marketing Managers who struggle with outsourcing, they usually have a certain mindset that likes to say “it’s faster if I do it myself,” or “I’ll end up spending the same time re-doing it anyway. As a result, they end up drowning themselves in a never-ending to-do list.

Being proactive entails building and empowering a team and delegating tasks to them. It’s normal for Social Media Virtual Assistants to take some time to adjust to your workflow, brand, tone of voice and company culture. But with patience and time, they’ll start getting a hang of it.
Then you’ll enter work bliss when with the new-found freedom to brainstorm, lead, and innovate.

2. Create a system

What most managers lack when outsourcing to Marketing Virtual Assistant Marketing professionals is a system for managing projects, ad hoc tasks, and deliverables. Use tools and create a workflow where you can effectively provide instructions and structure, this allows your Virtual Assistant clarity and confidence when they start working with you.

At the very least, you’ll need three systems— one for project management, file sharing, and communication. No idea what tools to use to do these tasks? Here are some of the most common for each category that you can check out:

Think of the long-term benefits

It’s hard to experience the beauty of the outsourcing journey if all we think about is the short-term benefits. There are cases that getting the results you want from outsourcing to a Marketing Virtual Assistant might take more time, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be long-term results.

Of course, in order to get long-term results, you also need to ensure that you hire right. Get someone who can grow with the team and commit to a long-term working relationship. Not someone who’s just looking for a quick buck and will be out of touch for a while.

We’ve come to realise over the years that we have existed as an Outsourcing specialist company that the companies that get Virtual Assistants to work with them long-term experience more results in the company.

3. Invest in training your Virtual Assistant

There’s an old adage about a conversation between a CEO and the company’s CFO where the latter asks his colleague the question: “what happens when we invest in our staff and they leave?” The CEO then responds with another question: “what happens when we don’t and they stay?”

Putting in resources to train and improve your staff isn’t a company expense. It’s an investment. The more our Virtual Assistants grow, the better they get and the more that they can do for the company. That’s why we at Outsourcing Angel invest in training our Virtual Assistants so that our clients get to experience more growth through their existing staff.

Don’t do it alone!

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
– African proverb

Like most things in a business operation, Marketing is best done in the context of a team. You could be the best Marketing professional in your business, but if you do things alone, you’ll always be limited by what you’re able to do with your own two hands. Having a Marketing Virtual Assistant, or even a team of assistants can help multiply your efforts and achieve more.

Looking to hire a Virtual Assistant to help you with your marketing tasks?

Tell us everything you’re looking for in a Virtual Assistant during a FREE Discovery Call with our Outsourcing Specialist and we’ll match you with the perfect angel for the job.