How to Start Working With A Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant To Grow Your Business
You know you should be marketing your business. Still, as a small business owner, you’re most likely already wearing many different hats, and adding marketing to your never-ending list of to-do items can feel overwhelming. And if you don’t have experience in marketing, it can not only feel overwhelming; it can be a rabbit hole that you get sucked into again and again. The solution? A digital marketing virtual assistant!
Many of my clients will tell me how much time they spend in these rabbit holes. They are looking for help with a particular marketing objective; Google it, and the next thing you know, half a day is gone!
A client told me she spent 3 hours on a simple task that I could have done in 15 minutes! I say all this because you don’t have to do everything yourself. In fact, as a small business owner, you should only focus on that ONE thing you can do and let your team handle the rest! That’s where a digital marketing virtual assistant comes in.
Our digital marketing assistant team can help you optimize your online presence, reach your target audience, and achieve your marketing goals. But how? What projects can we take on? How will we integrate with your current team? How will you measure our impact on your business?
Today, I’ll answer all these questions and more. We’ll explore the role of a digital marketing virtual assistant or team, the benefits we offer, and how we can transform your digital marketing strategy without breaking the bank. I want to provide you with valuable insights and practical tips to leverage the power of virtual assistance in digital marketing.
Content Overview
What is a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
How Do I Start Working with a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
Stage 1: Foundation
Branding, Messaging, Ideal Client Avatar Development & Funnels (Lead Generation)
Stage 2: Promotion
Content Marketing, Email Marketing & Social Media Marketing
Stage 3: Scale
More Funnels, Online Courses, Webinars, Memberships, Launches and Paid Advertising
Tips for Selecting the Right Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
Integrating a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant into Your Business
Overcoming Challenges and Building a Strong Working Relationship
Measuring the Impact of Your Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
The Future of Digital Marketing And Virtual Assistance
What is a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant?
Before we dive into the benefits and practicalities of hiring digital support, let’s first understand what they are. A digital marketing virtual assistant is not software or a bot. We are a tight-knit team of real professionals who work remotely to support your digital marketing efforts. Most of our team is located in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Our team offers an array of digital marketing services from website development and SEO, messaging, ideal client avatar development, content marketing, social media marketing, and advertising, email marketing, online course and membership development and much more.
We work on a contract basis, meaning you can hire us for a specific project or on an ongoing basis. This flexibility makes us cost-effective solutions for businesses of all sizes. We have clients who are just starting out and up to Fortune 500 companies, so we can create a strategy that will work for your business regardless of size and budget.
How Do I Start Working with a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant?
Once you decide you are tired of doing everything yourself or are ready to ramp up your business, you hire your marketing team. Great! Now what? Where do you start, and which projects make the most sense to hand off first? That depends on your business’s stage. If you are unsure, please take our quiz.
FREE RESOURCE: Quiz
Stage 1: Foundation
If you’re a new business or a company that needs a solid foundation, you’re in the foundation stage. Here are the projects I recommend clients hand off to us if they are in the foundation stage.
Branding, Messaging, Ideal Client Avatar Development, Website & Funnels (Lead Generation)
If you’re in the foundation stage, you may or may not have a website/SEO, logo, and branding. A website is no longer optional. It’s foundational for your business. You may also have some messaging down, but you need to check if the messaging is speaking to your ideal client. You may also think you know your ideal client, but chances are your ideal client avatar needs to be narrower, making it easier for your messaging and branding to connect with your perfect client.
FREE RESOURCE: Branding Workbook
Suppose you must be more transparent about your ideal client and what you can do for them. In that case, I always recommend we spend some time developing your ideal client avatar to ensure that we’re getting super specific and detailed so you’re attracting the right clients from the start. The same goes for your messaging; does it put your customer at the center of the hero’s journey? Is your messaging clear, concise, story-driven, personality-infused, and pulling in your ideal client while communicating immediate value and stealthy selling? And your branding: do you have a strong, positive identity for your business, products, and services? Does your branding differentiate you from its peer brands and make your brand memorable to your ideal client?
Once you have your branding, messaging, and ideal client down, you’ll want to create your first funnel to start growing your community (lead generation) and nurturing those prospects: you. You may also see some sales coming in the door.
FREE RESOURCE: Core Lead Magnet
Stage 2: Promote
If you’ve been in a business for a while, seen some success, and are ready to move to the next level, you’re in the promotion stage. This means you already have a strong foundation, know your ideal client inside and out, and your messaging and branding resonate with your audience and have begun to pull customers in. You have a search engine optimized (SEO) website and a full-funnel build-out that gives your audience a tremendous free download, nurturing them with a guaranteed sequence. You may already have a few sales coming in from your efforts. Now, it’s time to ramp up! Here are the projects I suggest a client starts with if they are in the growing stage:
Content Marketing, Email Marketing & Social Media Marketing
First, you must start creating content that speaks to your ideal audience. Regarding content marketing, I always advise my clients to start with one piece of content each week: a blog, podcast, or video. Why? Because we are working to establish you as an expert in your field, and by creating weekly content, you start to establish yourself as an expert and have content that we can use for your social media marketing and email marketing.
FREE RESOURCE: Content Calendar
We’ll create a content calendar with topics that resonate with your audience. We’ll begin to plug your free lead magnet into your content so you’ll also start to get more people onto your email list. Once you or we create your weekly piece of content, we’ll pull it apart to build enough assets for you to share content in your emails and social media for the week and beyond.
For example, I have a client that records a weekly podcast. To make her podcast content stretch into a lot of other types of content, we convert it into a blog (using the shownotes and or script as a basis, and we have her record the podcast with video so that we can use it as a video on YouTube and in her social media. We also transform the content into a weekly newsletter for her subscribers and use the audio, video, and text content as content for social media. By doing this, we get a massive bang for her marketing buck!
Stage 3: Scale
Next up is the scale stage; you’re in this stage if you have a solid foundation, you’re promoting your existing freebies and paid products and services, and you’re ready to level up by expanding your expertise into other paid products and or services. Here are some products we focus on when working with clients in the scale stage:
More Funnels, Online Courses, Webinars, Memberships, Launches and Paid Advertising
Once we’re in the scale stage, it’s time to look deeply into what works well in your business and spin off that. For example, I have a client who has an excellent foundation in her website/SEO with very tight messaging and branding. She also has 3 lead magnets for her different client avatars, continually adding more prospects to her email list. We also have a funnel that nurtures those leads coming in from the lead magnet and filters those people into paid products and services based on where they are in their journey. She regularly has a nice stream of new clients but was ready to add gasoline!
We started by auditing her existing funnels, found gaps, and suggested further fleshing out the funnels and adding more client touchpoints to level up with her. Then, we helped you develop new products and paid service packages and offered suggestions on what projects to focus on to get more clients in the door faster. We landed on building a webinar funnel leading to an online course.
We’re in the process of creating content for the webinar and online course; when we get closer to launch, we’ll start marketing the webinar via organic and paid advertising. During the webinar, we will give her audience quick wins to get them to sign up for her paid online course at the end of the webinar. This will become a quarterly launch strategy for her, and once we have a nice amount of prospects and clients coming into these funnels, we’re then going to scale into a monthly membership.
Tips for Selecting the Right Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
Once you’ve identified your needs, you can start the hiring process. If you decide to go with us, hooray! If not, here are some tips to help you find the ideal digital marketing virtual assistant:
Look for relevant experience:
A virtual assistant with experience in digital marketing will be able to hit the ground running. Be careful here. I’ve done many interviews in my day, and many people will say they know digital marketing, but they don’t, so they ask many questions and ask to see samples of their work.
Check their communication skills:
Effective communication is critical when working with a virtual assistant. I have tricks for ensuring that anyone I hire will have excellent communication. If I put up a job listing, I’ll hide a keyword in the text and ask them to include it in their subject line when applying. If they don’t, they get deleted immediately. I also monitor how quickly they reply to my emails. If I don’t hear from them for a few days, I will delete it again. I need people who are quick to act.
Ask for references:
A reputable virtual assistant should be able to provide references from previous clients. I want to chat with a reference, as I’ve seen some people add testimonials to their websites that aren’t theirs. Over the years, several people have stolen testimonials from my website and added them to their own. Boo!
Conduct an interview:
This will allow you to assess their skills and see if they fit your business well. Again, make sure to ask questions. Please pay attention to how they look when they show up. I’m always looking for professionals. Many people don’t think this is important since so many of us work remotely. I always want to see professionalism, so whether during an interview, client Zoom calls, or even team meetings, I want my team to look the part.
Start with a trial period:
This allows you to assess their work before committing to a long-term arrangement. Whenever I hire, I do a trial period. Usually, I’ll hire two people for the same job simultaneously because, low and behold, one won’t be responsive or work out. But either way, in the end, I always have at least one new, incredible team member to add to my team.
Integrating a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant into Your Business
Once you’ve hired that perfect virtual assistant, the next step is to integrate them into your business. Here are my tips for making that successful.
Setting Clear Objectives and Expectations
Setting clear objectives and expectations is crucial for successful integration. Your virtual assistant needs to understand their role and responsibilities. If a team like ours hires you, this process will differ, as we like to guide you. We’re the experts, so we want to set clear objectives and expectations so you always know where we are on your projects. Whether you work with a team that is guiding the ship or you plan to guide the boat yourself, make sure that your virtual assistant understands your business goals and how you want their work to contribute to the success of your business.
Communication and Collaboration Strategies
Effective communication and collaboration are crucial to integrating a virtual assistant into your team. Regular check-ins should ensure everyone is on the same page and address any issues promptly. I like to meet with all of my clients weekly or bi-weekly. Having regular check-ins not only helps us stay on the same page, but it’s a quick and easy way to answer questions, strategize, and grow our working relationship. I also recommend using some project management systems to organize your projects. We do this on our end for our clients so they don’t have the extra work to manage multiple projects or tasks; we do that for them!
Overcoming Challenges and Building a Strong Working Relationship
Growing your business will always come with some growing pains. You will likely encounter challenges when you hire someone to help you grow it. Here are my tips for quickly overcoming challenges and fostering a robust and productive relationship with your team.
Potential Challenges and Their Solutions
The most common challenge that I see is communication. Since virtual assistants work remotely, there can be issues with time zones, language barriers, or simply miscommunication. To overcome this, it’s essential to establish clear communication channels and regular check-ins. We use Slack for our team communication, and it’s an excellent way for me to check in with all of my team members to see how they are and what they are working on, get real-time updates, and answer questions. We also use a project management system where every project we work on is set up and outlined. This keeps all of our project communication in one place and ensures that everyone working on a project understands what it entails and our goals.
Measuring the Impact of Your Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant
The impact of a digital marketing virtual assistant can be measured in various ways. These include increased productivity, cost savings, and improved digital marketing outcomes. A client recently told me that after she did her taxes, she realized that her business had more than tripled since working together. If that isn’t a great way to measure impact, I need to know what is! Here are some other ways to measure impact:
Tracking Performance and ROI
One way to measure the impact is by tracking the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. This can be done using various analytics tools that provide insights into metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, and email open rates. Another way is to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of virtual assistant hiring. This involves comparing the cost of hiring the assistant with their value to your business.
Case Studies: Success Stories of Virtual Assistant Integration
My website has numerous success stories of businesses that have benefited from hiring a digital marketing virtual assistant. For instance, one of our clients saw a 280% increase in email signups, resulting from the organic social media marketing we do for her. Another client saw a 2300% rise in website impressions and was able to sell out her Etsy shop when we ran Pinterest ads for her. Still, another client saw $75k in revenue in 3 months due to our social media ads, and the $75k was after ad spend (ROAS), cost of goods (COGs), and our time to set up and manage the ads!
The Future of Digital Marketing and Virtual Assistance
The future of digital marketing and virtual assistance keeps getting better and better. When I started my business in 2001, I mostly helped clients with website development, email marketing, and shopping cart management. Now, I’m helping clients with all aspects of their business building and marketing, and it’s been so much fun!
In conclusion, a digital marketing virtual assistant can be a game-changer for your business. We cannot only help you set up a solid foundation for your business, but we can also help you reach goals that you may have yet to think were possible. You could be one of our clients doubling their annual revenue or adding a new stream of passive income to their business that they didn’t realize was possible. If you have any questions about hiring a digital marketing virtual assistant or if you’d like to consider hiring our team, I’d love to chat!
Links for This Episode on How to Start Working with A Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant to Grow Your Business
- Discover Your Digital Marketing Success Path
https://jennielyon.com/quiz - Brand Building Workbook
https://jennielyon.com/brandworkbook - How to Create Your Core Lead Magnet
https://jennielyon.com/websiteaudit - Ideal Client Avatar Template
https://jennielyon.com/ica - Schedule a free call with Jennie today!
https://jennielyon.com/chatwithjennie - How to Use our Digital Marketing Team
https://jennielyon.com/vateam
Get in touch with Jennie:
🔹Free Consultation
https://jennielyon.com/chatwithjennie
🔹Jennielyon.com
🔹Social Media @jennielyonmarketing
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