Running a Virtual Assistant business is no easy work. As a Virtual Assistant, you are tasked with time consuming work that requires you to pay close attention to details. You have to get things done for clients and do your personal business too. The huge workload can limit the number of clients you can handle at once since you only have as many hours in a day. But for you to succeed as a Virtual Assistant, you often need to take on and manage multiple clients. This means that you need to find ways of completing more tasks in less time. Thanks to automation, you can make this happen!
Automation can help you handle repetitive tasks and other time consuming manual processes. It also eliminates human error. If used properly, you can leverage it to take on more clients and offer value-added services that you couldn’t do otherwise. Your clients will be happy as well and your services will blow their minds. Exciting, isn’t it?
Here Are 6 Things You Could Automate In Your Virtual Assistant Business
1.) Email Marketing And Lead Generation
You have to constantly market your virtual assistant business even if you are fully booked. This is because you might need to fire a client or a client might let you go at any time. It is better to have a list of warm leads waiting for an opportunity to work with you.
Lead generation is a set and forget system that I love and use in my business. One smart idea is instead of handing prospective clients your services and pricing guide. You could use it as a lead magnet.
Potential clients only have to enter their name and email to get it. That way, you can follow up, nurture them and turn them to paying clients. Email marketing tools I love are use are: Sendfox and Brevo (formerly sendinblue).
2.) Email Management
If you aren’t already, email management is one thing you need to automate in your virtual assistant business. You can do this by setting up templates for quick responses and automating things like common question responses and forwarding of Email to appropriate clients.
By reducing Email management time, you can increase your workload capacity and still get this done. The email management tool I love and use is Gmail
3.) Bookings
You can use automated meeting and appointment scheduling systems to reduce this stress of scheduling appointments. To do this, you just have to configure your calendar based on your scheduling preferences including preferred times and location. This way, clients and prospective clients can schedule meetings with you without the need for back and forth emails to sync schedules.
This takes off the stress of manually adding meetings to your schedule and worrying about notifying participants of changes to scheduled appointments or meetings. This also allows either party to cancel or reschedule meetings without needless back and forth communication. Booking tools I love and use are Tidycal and calendly
4.) Invoicing
If your clients subscribe to a monthly package. You could create a monthly subscription payment page like this, to automatically collect payments on your behalf. This way, it will be easy to charge clients when due, follow up unpaid invoices and even charge late payment fees.
You can put much of your invoicing work on autopilot by turning to an invoicing automation solution. With automation, you can send more accurate and timely invoices to clients. You can also use the accounting automation tool to remind clients of overdue bills. Handing these accounting tasks to automation can help you focus on other tasks.
Some invoicing tools I use are Paystack, Zoho invoice, and Invoice.ng
5.) Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is another area you should automate in your virtual assistant business. All you have to do is pre-plan your content and create it in advance. Scheduling tools will publish as scheduled. Social media marketing tools like zoho social can do a lot more like publish already published posts, find the best hashtags, use AI to write engaging captions for your posts etc.
This can improve your posting consistency which is key to building a larger audience and improving engagement metrics. Some social media automation tools can also help you manage follower interactions on multiple social channel.
Social media automation tools I use and love are Zoho social, planoly and preview
6.) SEO Blogging
SEO blogging can be automated to help you get organic leads. All you have to do is write and optimise your content in advance and schedule them.
For example I am writing this post you are reading now in July and will schedule it in a few hours to be automatically published in a month’s time while I will be on maternity leave and nursing my son. This way, I can batch create content and schedule to automatically go out at a set date. So even while I am on maternity leave, my business will not close shop. My website will continue to provide help to new and aspiring virtual assistants while I am away.
Wrapping up…
Automation opportunities are not limited to these. But in all, it can help you grow your business and become more competitive. So I hope you start by automating these things today in your virtual assistant business.