Marketing a Virtual Assistant Business

Marketing your virtual assistant business does not have to be as daunting as it sounds. Below are the best ways to market your virtual assistant business, including different methods we have used successfully. 

Begin by choosing 2 or 3 different methods that you think will work best for you, then you can begin implementing more marketing methods over time.

HOW TO MARKET YOURSELF AS A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT  

Social Media

Social media is a great way to network and engage with your target audience. When done correctly, social media can be a big win for your business. It enables you to be seen by people from all over the world who potentially need your service.

Social media is not the place to directly sell your services but rather a place to be helpful and express yourself. It is okay to show a bit of your personality as long as you don’t post anything damaging or compromising to your brand.

Platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter can be the right environment to network and start casual or business relationships with people within your industry and target market.

People often turn to social media with quick questions. If you can be in the right place at the right time with the correct information, you increase the opportunity to show your target audience your expertise.

Some businesses get all of their clients through social media. If you choose to concentrate on building relationships and providing valuable content through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, then the possibilities of attracting new customers increase dramatically. This is because social media allows others to share your content, potentially leading to your content going ‘viral’ within your niche.

Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are the most popular channels where you will find virtual assistants. Some very creative virtual assistants have managed to make a success from other channels such as Pinterest.

I recommend setting up a profile on all three channels and choosing one or two that you will focus your marketing on. If you are a new virtual assistant business and a sole trader, then chances are you can’t be everywhere at once, so focusing on utilising one platform to build relationships with your target audience is going to be more effective than trying to focus on all three. You can use a website like Hootsuite, post to all three social media platforms at once, and focus on the main one that works best for you.

When you have created your business social media profiles, begin by inviting your existing contacts to like and follow the page. Share content. Even if you don’t have your own content, share someone else’s that is useful to your target audience.

It can be helpful to your customers to share useful content written by others. This can also help build a relationship with the company or the individual whose content you are sharing. Eventually, this can lead to partnerships. This is discussed further below.

You can also participate in group chats where you should be answering questions that help your audience and show your expertise. Starting a conversation is likely to get you noticed and is a clever way to have focused discussions around your skills and service.    

Marketing yourself as a virtual assistant on social media is supposed to be a relaxed, fun way to meet potential clients, not a hard sell of your services.

Get friendly with the search feature and start searching for new groups and #hashtags that have been posted. This will help you engage with people who have been talking about a specific subject recently.

Example: 

You are a virtual assistant. Your target audience is new business start-ups

Head to Twitter and type one of the hashtags below into the search bar

#newbusiness

#startup

#new startup

Performing a search will show you all the tweets that include the hashtag. You then can join in conversations easily, as results are usually displayed by the most recent post.

Even if you feel like social media is not the main marketing method you want to focus on for your virtual assistant business, it’s still recommended that you create a social media account and post regularly.

There are tools out there like Buffer and Hootsuite that allow you to manage multiple listings across the most popular social networks. That way, you don’t need to log in to each social media account individually to post. You simply post from one website to all social media accounts. Buffer allows you to schedule posts for specific times.

Some virtual assistants and freelancers have made social media their main marketing platform by starting their own Facebook group. They then use this to communicate to prospects and customers.

Pre-planning your social media strategy is just as important as analysing it after. Tracking your progress can be done quickly by accessing the analytical data on your social media account. This shows you the number of views and the number of clicks through to your website. This way, you can see which posts were effective and then determine what made them effective and continue doing more of that.

Cold Email Marketing

This method is highly underrated. When Prime P.A was founded, the company was built solely through cold email marketing. Nowadays, we have many repeat customers and no longer need to run such large email campaigns, but still do from time to time. With recent changes to the law regarding how we process personal data, such as G.D.P.R. coming into action, there are a lot more rules with what you can and can’t do when it comes to sending a cold email.

However, if you play it safe and follow all of the guidelines such as researching and personalising the emails, providing an opt-out, not harassing people and ensuring your content is highly relevant, you can still send a cold email and not be breaking the rules.

Our cold email campaigns also generate click-throughs to our website, which prompts visitors to get a free estimate as that is one of the main call to actions on Prime P.A services website. This was incorporated into the website using Vcita software. This has enabled us to increase our sales by 30% using the automatic estimate approval feature.

Prime P.A’s client finder course explains exactly step by step how we generate our leads through cold email. It also includes telephone scripts you can use as a guide. You can check out more details about the course here. Cold emailing is a marketing method that can be easily monitored, tracked and automated. The client finder course also features details of other marketing methods proven to work, many of them featured here. Cold email marketing is a personal favourite as it enables maximum outreach in the shortest space of time.

Nowadays, we get a lot more inbound traffic from content marketing and S.E.O. In the Client Finder Course, this is explained in detail. It is also featured as a section further below in this post. 

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a system where you get a prospect’s attention, capture their information, then build a relationship with possibilities of upselling at a later stage.

Capturing a prospect’s attention when using a sales funnel is usually done by luring them into your funnel with a free irresistible offer. The more compelling and targeted you make your offer, the more likely they are to sign-up. Most sales funnels attract sign-ups by offering something of value for free. This should be something that you know your target market would need, like an e-book that features valuable content relating to a problem you can solve.

If you incorporate a sales funnel with content marketing and S.E.O., you will generate more visitors into your funnel.

This is done by creating content that is search engine optimised, which leads more visitors to your offer. This is the very first stage of the funnel.  

Example: – You’re a virtual assistant, and your niche is web design.

You can create a sales funnel to lead people to a landing page that requests their details in exchange for a free website review. The website review includes three changes that can be made to their website to attract more traffic and increase conversion.

Your marketing will be aimed at updating/ improving their site but can also lead to building a new site and generating even more revenue.

Not only are you offering a free review, but you’re also offering to provide them with valuable information about changes they could make that could potentially double their income. The majority of prospects who sign up for the website review are most likely not currently aware of how their website performance could be improved and welcome the information from an expert.

Some people will take the information and advice you provide and neglect to make any changes even though they know they probably should, but the majority of people will consider that changes should be made. If it is not something they can easily do for themselves, they will be more than likely to respond to your review and ask you to do it.

If you haven’t already started a sales funnel, then this is something you should consider. Start by jotting down some ideas for your offer. Remember, you can always test results and change to a different offer and see what works best.

As mentioned before at Prime P.A., Our most successful form of marketing in the beginning stages was cold email outreach. Now imagine if we had built a database of people who are already interested in our services and advice and marketed directly to them from the start.  I am confident the results would have been even better. So don’t delay or sleep on this method. It should definitely be implemented sooner rather than later.

There’s some more information on how to set up a sales funnel here.

Email Marketing

Email marketing to people you already have a relationship with, or people who have opted in to receive your emails, is an excellent method of communicating with past and existing clients.

Send a message to all your past and existing customers with some helpful information. You can send offers for your services.

Our preferred method is to email a specific offer relating to something we know they need or relating to a service we have provided for them in the past. This helps to trigger them into realising they perhaps still need our services.

Very rarely do we send the same email marketing message or offer to every customer. We used to send mass marketing email offers, but we converted more sales after analysing conversion rates when sending individual-specific offers tailored to clients.

It does take a lot more effort and time to draw up individual offers; however, the results are worth it. We have a process that when a service/ product has been purchased, we add a note of an upsell service/ product we can market to the client by email in relation to a service we already provided.

By making this change, we have managed to retain a lot more customers. If the customer decides to purchase the upsell service/ product or any other service from us, we then update our notes by replacing it with another upsell that we can offer in the future. I know not every customer will want or need the service continually; however, we would at least like the offers they receive to be specific to their business. This way, they are more likely to consider it.

We don’t always hear back from customers straight away regarding our email marketing offers. Sometimes it can take a few months, then the customer will call in regards to the offer. Try adding an expiry date to your offer once in a while to secure new clients during a time frame that you decide. This comes in handy when you know a contract is coming to an end and you need to secure some new contracts by a particular time.

Email marketing to existing customers or potential customers should not always be sales focused. It is recommended to send only one sales-focused email per month. Any other emails you send within the month should be solving a problem or providing helpful information.

Customers may be sent a reminder email about the offer after a while or near the expiry date. The purpose of the majority of your marketing emails should be to add value to your audience.

The purpose is to be present in people’s minds, be seen, and make others aware of you. It is not always to sell.

Telemarketing

I know you may want to overlook this part as there are so many negative connotations surrounding telesales/telemarketing.

I can tell you from personal experience that it does work. I am unsure if this is because I have a history of telesales experience cold calling customers selling everything from wills, life insurance, pet insurance, and digital TV packages.

I can tell you first hand that yes, you are likely to be met with some negative responses when telemarketing. Not everyone is going to be happy about someone they don’t know, calling them randomly.

I don’t recommend getting out the phone book and calling random businesses trying to sell your services. Telemarketing works best with a strategy. What we do at Prime PA is incorporate it into our cold email campaign. We begin by cold emailing the prospect a few times first. This way, they are usually more receptive to our call as they usually remember the emails. This means rather than it being a freezing cold call, it is more like a warm call.

Use the personalisation method mentioned in the cold email marketing section. This should help you to build a rapport with them over the phone quickly.

Don’t attempt to sell to the customer on the first telemarketing call. You will have a hard time getting anybody to trust you, instead focus on relationship and rapport building.

This section is covered in detail in the Client finder course.

Networking + Referrals

Depending on your personality and lifestyle, networking may be all you need to do in order to get enough clients to achieve your virtual assistant goals.

If you have a lot of friends or contacts who are already using your service or could do with using your services, this will be a good place to begin, as they are already in your network of contacts, so they are likely to be willing to refer you, especially if you did a good job in the past.

Use your policies and make sure they are aware of them before carrying out work to save any disagreements.

Meetup.com and Eventbrite all have lots of different business events. You can also check your local chamber of commerce as well.

Each business networking event will differ depending on who will be hosting. Some are relaxed, and some are more formal with a structure including timelines for pitches and speakers.

I have attended events listed on meetup.com. I personally prefer a more open style of networking, so rather than attending a dedicated business networking event, I attend social events that my target market also attends, which I also take an interest in.

With this method, I may not get access to a room of 1000 different business owners all trying to sell their services, but I may meet 4 or 5 people that I get to have a deep enough conversation with and be the only person that presents a business to them.

You don’t want to go to social events and start doing a business pitch. It won’t be welcomed. Rather than start a conversation and inquire about what they do and tell them what you do, you can ask for a business card. Nine out of ten will ask for yours in return. After the event, you can stay in contact by emailing or calling. I find this a much more effective and fun way of networking. I only attend meetups that cater to my interests. This way, when I call a potential prospect that I have met, we have more to talk about than just business as we share a common interest, so it is easier to build a long-lasting relationship.

So for this to work smoothly and professionally, you’ll need to have your business card ready. If you haven’t done so already, you can order from Vistaprint. For extra high-quality cards, check out Moo.com.

Focusing on marketing a virtual assistant business using a couple of the above methods will ensure you get noticed by the right people.

It is recommended to write a marketing plan which involves taking different marketing steps on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.