10 Things A Virtual Assistant Can Do

For plenty of businesses, outsourcing tasks to a Virtual Assistant has become a much better alternative to hiring a full-time employee. There are a number of reasons for this: 

1. Virtual Assistants (VAs) are more cost-efficient as they’re paid on an hourly rate and often work for only a few hours per day. You also won’t have to pay for office equipment and space, taxes, and bonuses. You only pay for work done.
2. You can hire specialized VAs for particular tasks such as SEO management—Full-time employees often perform general tasks and may lack specialized skills
3. VAs handle administrative and clerical tasks allowing top-level employees to focus on business-critical tasks

In this guide, we’ll discuss the major tasks to outsource to a virtual assistant and explain how you can find and hire an excellent VA using a fully automated hiring funnel.

Virtual assistant services range from general administrative duties to specialized tasks such as graphic design. By having a Virtual Assistant carry out various responsibilities remotely, you will have more time to focus on growth and revenue-generating activities.

Here are the top 10 responsibilities you can outsource to a virtual assistant:

1. General clerical work
2. Social Media Management
3. Accounting
4. SEO and Digital Marketing 
5. Website Management
6. Content Writing and Management
7. Customer Support
8. Recruitment Support
9. Audio and Video Editing
10. Data Entry and Transcription

General Administrative Responsibilities 

Most businesses hire virtual assistants to handle general administrative tasks. While clerical and administrative duties are easy to handle, they also tend to be repetitive and tedious. They also don’t require any education background or specialized training to perform.

The following table highlights some of the most common administrative responsibilities:

Social Media Management

A social media presence is a must-have for businesses. To manage and grow your social media business accounts, you’ll need a dedicated social media VA. Social media VAs perform several duties:

• Write, edit and share posts on your company’s social media profiles
• Engage with your online community by responding to inquiries (DMs and comments)
• Lead contests, conversations and polls on Instagram and other platforms
• Ensure information on the company’s social media page is up-to-date
• Create promotions and campaigns to attract new customers and increase brand awareness
• Monitor the performance of campaigns using relevant tools (Facebook Ads, TikTok Business Suite, etc.) 
• Research the current trends and competitors’ social media strategies 
• Maintain a consistent brand image across all platforms
• Regularly perform social media audits on traffic, mentions, shares, etc. to track overall growth 

Accounting and Bookkeeping

Regardless of the size of a business, accounting and payroll management is one of the most time-consuming and tedious activities in business management. These activities may take up too much time for a top-level employee in your business. Hiring a bookkeeping virtual assistant is the best way to save time and money as they perform a range of accounting duties, such as:

• Basic payroll management (bonuses, employee deductions, incentives, overtime pay)
• Invoicing clients 
• Tax management
• Banking responsibilities like paying bills and transferring funds
• Maintaining and reconciling financial records using accounting software like Xero 

SEO and Digital Marketing 

If you want to boost web traffic to your site, brand awareness, and sales, get a Virtual Assistant specialized and experienced in SEO and digital marketing. Hiring these specialized virtual assistants is much more affordable than getting a full-time employee or putting together a digital marketing team. 

Here’s what SEO Virtual Assitants do:

• Lead email marketing campaigns
• Link building 
• Guest blogging
• Keyword research 
• YouTube Marketing
• Implementing PPC (paid-per-click) campaigns
• Competitor analysis

Website Management

As a company, your website acts as the digital storefront for your business. As such, your site should be fast, easy to use and navigate, and highly responsive. 

A virtual assistant specialized in web development and management will ensure your website and e-commerce store run smoothly. You can outsource the following tasks to a web management VA:

• Installing, customizing, and updating plugins to enable customizability of site features and functionality and keep the site secure
• Providing technical support
• Developing secure payment and ticketing systems for an eCommerce store
• Perform regular website backups
• Optimizing the user interface (UI) and ensuring cross-device and browser compatibility

Content Writing and Management

Content writing is the ideal strategy for growing a website and blog organically. Still, to achieve this, you need an excellent content marketing virtual assistant to write and publish high-quality content for your website.  

Your dedicated virtual assistant should be an excellent writer and marketing expert as this enables them to:

1. Write for a specific demographic
2. Be informative without being wordy
3. Effectively incorporate aspects of SEO to optimize blog articles and the overall website 

Apart from that, content writing Virtual Assistants perform the following day-to-day duties:

• Write and publish blog articles 
• Guest blogging 
• Developing press releases and newsletters
• Producing promotional material such as white papers, infographics, and ebooks
• Responding to blog comments
• Interviewing clients and writing case studies

Customer Support

Hiring a customer service virtual assistant is a great way to build authentic rapports with your customers. These VAs take care of a range of customer support activities:

• Creating support tickets 
• Live chat support 
• Creating and conducting customer surveys using online form tools like Google Forms and social media polls
• Responding to inquiries sent to the support desk 

Recruitment Activities 

The recruitment process has a lot of moving parts that can easily get overwhelming for a business without the proper personnel and support structures. 

When hiring, you should outsource recruitment responsibilities to a dedicated hiring Virtual Assistant to be able to focus on the big picture. These tasks include:

• Developing highly specific job descriptions
• Posting on various job boards
• Using relevant recruitment software to evaluate resumes, test candidates, send follow-up emails, and onboard successful candidates 

Audio and Video Editing

You can easily learn how to create and edit video and audio on YouTube, but that would take a lot of time. It’s much more convenient to outsource editing to a specialized virtual assistant. These assistants have the skills and experience to make your podcasts, tutorials, and webinars look and sound amazing, even without the best audio or video equipment. 

A professional video and audio editing professional can help with:

• Basic video editing (splicing intros and outros, adding music, inputting text and graphics, etc.)
• Setting up, recording, and editing podcasts
• Editing images and videos that will be published on your social media
• Denoising video and audio

Data Entry and Transcription

Most businesses will require data entry services at some point. 

While it’s often a straightforward task, data entry can easily get repetitive and tedious, and outsourcing it to a VA who specializes in data entry is necessary. 

The virtual assistants help you collect, input, and sort your data using the appropriate software. They’re also responsible for converting audio to text (transcription)

Use Workello To Hire Top Quality Virtual Assistants

If you want to free up valuable time to focus on business growth strategies, you should hire a virtual assistant that suits your company’s needs. You can’t simply hire candidates with the lowest fees because most times, these applicants are inexperienced or lack the necessary skills. You need a professional who is reliable and gets the job done on time.

The best way to find and hire good candidates is by testing as many applicants as possible and while reviewing a handful of portfolios is easy, sorting through dozens of them daily can be a grueling process without automation. 

Without a proper system, you will not be able to test candidates, schedule interviews, and communicate with applicants, among other activities. To counter these issues, we developed Workello, an automated hiring funnel that:

1. Automates every step of the recruitment process (testing, candidate correspondence, interview scheduling)
2. Enables you to post your job ads on as many hiring job boards as you please
3. Has a well-integrated dashboard where you can view, sort, and update the status of candidates, regardless of the job site they applied from
4. Enables you to send out tests to candidates 
5. Has a Candidate Status page where candidates can view where they are in the hiring funnel and have access to comprehensive applicant FAQs

Sign up for Workello to find and outsource top talent VAs. When you sign up, you’ll be able to test up to 5 Virtual Assistants for free!