Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Virtual Assistant

Back in the 90s, you didn’t have a stable internet connection, powerful computer to carry out day to day office tasks and a resource book you could rely on whenever struggling with a roadblock in your line of work. So, to complete your responsibilities, you needed to visit your office and spend 8-10 hours/day.

Today, it’s a completely different story. Now, you have efficient computers, high-speed internet connects and powerful search engines like Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go at your disposal 24/7. So, limiting yourself and your business to just full-time employees is just not efficient anymore.

In this article, I am going to talk about why you should hire a virtual employee and what are the many benefits of having a virtual employee or a team of dedicated virtual employees supporting your business 24/7.

Let’s get right into it.

1: Time Management

Nobody can work continuously. You have to take breaks in between and let your full-time employees off at around 5 pm on work days. At least that’s what most of the companies here in the US practice. While this might work with many companies, some companies servicing the tech, medicine, and other professional niche need promptness no matter when the customer contacts them.

Since your employees might not be available at those times, converting these prospects becomes impossible. That’s one of the biggest problems that a fleet of virtual could solve. You have two choices. You can either hire a reliable digital marketing agency or hire a virtual employee.

Hiring virtual employees from a different time zone will enable you to reach out to more people and extend your custom support hours.

Your customers and prospects don’t have to wait 24 hours to get a reply from you and your regular full-time employees don’t have to bear the burden of taking on more responsibilities when they are already taking your business to new heights every single day.

Many big-time companies and multinational corporations like Godaddy and Namecheap use virtual employees from different time zones to make their service available 24×7. Yes, there’s an option to hire a few more regular full-time employees, but let’s be honest. Hiring regular full-time employees locally will cost you at least thrice the amount you’d spend on virtual employees.

2: Extend Your Skill sets and Talents

Hiring experienced, talented employees is a tough job only a few companies in the US successfully properly do. Even then, they face some difficulties negotiating contracts and benefits.

People with experience and good work history will not settle for a compromise. This is a big problem when running a startup. You don’t have such kind of investment laying around. You have to report to your investors while keeping everything running the way it should. Spending a huge amount on employees would be an unwise decision.

That’s why most startups rely on virtual assistants to get the ball rolling. Not only do you get your work done, but you also get to work with a lot of very talented, dedicated and sincere people from around the world. Affordability also comes in handy as most virtual employees will not charge you as much and will definitely demand benefits and concessions.

Here’s a list of professionals from different niches you could hire without spending a fortune:

1: Web Developers (Web developers and designers are always in high-demand. If you have a website or run a communication dependent website, chances are that you’ll need a programming specialist.

Wed developers can help you save you a lot of revenue and frustration. Since web programming is such a popular industry, you’ll find a good web developer/expert within a few days of your hunting. The best part: They don’t charge as much).

2: Technical virtual assistants (Want someone to keep a record of your mail, website related small tasks, replying to your business emails and answering those technical questions confidently? Get a technical virtual assistant.

We hire tech VAs from time to time to reduce our workload and help us with some very specific technical problems).

3: Bookkeeping services to keep your accounts logged and recorded at a very affordable price by some of the most talented virtual accountants for your business.

4: Software engineers.

5: Marketing experts, and inbound marketing experts to push your online real estate to new heights. Marketing in general needs a lot of research, brainstorming, and testing.

Having a virtual team of marketing expert will help you in attracting prospects and search engine traffic while you are struggling with your marketing budget

3: Cost Efficient and Flexible

On average, you pay a whopping $4,000/month if you have a regular employee handling your technical needs. This cost can go up if you are looking for something very niche specific like dedicated server support or WordPress tech support.

These two niche doesn’t demand that much pampering. All you have to keep things running properly is to update your codes and plugins on a weekly basis. But, you have to pay $4K/month to someone to get this job done.

Did you know you could hire WoodBows and pay a fraction of the above-mentioned amount to take care of a lot more responsibilities?

Not only us but if you go and do some research about hiring a technical virtual assistant, you will see that they are plenty of options available at an affordable price and guess what, all of them will the get the job done.

If you are on a very tight budget, you could try to crack an hourly rates deal with your virtual assistant. Or perhaps you could also come to an arrangement where you pay according to the jobs completed.

This is not recommended and you might not find any virtual assistant but you always have an option to hire freelance professionals. Then again, if you are running a business, I would suggest you pay an hourly rate instead of not paying them enough. But freelancer from those websites are not reliable, you can’t trust them with your projects either.

The secret behind running an efficient virtual team is to keep everyone satisfied with the work environment and salary.

4: Social Media Management Made Easy

Social media marketing is the best way to gain some traction online if your target customers are heavy social media users. Even if they aren’t, you still get to build your reputation on social verticals.

But, social media marketing takes some planning, strategizing and right execution. For this, you need an experienced social media marketing specialist. A person you could count on while managing everything else helping your business grow.

Referring to a previous point, you can hire multiple virtual assistants with social media expertise for the cost of hiring only one local full-time employee. As they are offering a specific service, they are more knowledgable and passionate about their jobs.

Send over your social media profiles and ask them to lay down a social media strategy to get your business known.

On top of just promoting your brand online, social media can also be used to keep your customers aware of your latest products, improve your customer service and customer interaction.

Social media presence will boost your credibility and place you in front of your prospects as a trustworthy entity and business.

So, if you wondering whether to start social media marketing or only rely on old school marketing tactics, trust me, you need social media to grow your business.

5: Continuous Operation Despite Natural or Human Disasters

One of the many difficulties businesses face occasionally is natural disasters or damage caused by a human error. When you are running a business that needs to keep its operations at optimum levels at all times, you cannot afford service disruption.

One such industry is web servers and database industry. These companies need to keep their servers running round the clock. Even a tiny 10-second blackout could cost them a lot of money and negative feedback on review websites.

So, they innovated cloud web servers which eliminate the data blackouts by storing data on several servers locating in different locations.

A virtual assistant is your version of an operations blackout. Internation location and a different time zone sure have its benefits when it comes to disaster-proofing your business. You can count on your virtual assistants to keep your business operational when the rest of your team is struggling.

A stable business is more likely to get positive ratings online and build a better client-customer relationship in the long run.

6: Scaling Your Business Without Risking A Lot Of Investment

Scaling your business with Virtual assistants is risk-free and easy. Take a look at the below process chart for hiring a regular 9-5 employee vs hiring a virtual assistant:

The few extra steps not included in the second flow chart can save you a lot of money. Not to mention, you don’t have to wait for 4 weeks for your shortlisted employee to start working. If you hire a virtual assistant, you can expect them to start working within 24 hours. If you are skeptical about hiring a complete stranger, you can keep your virtual employee on probation to see if they can deliver on their promises.

If you don’t feel comfortable working with someone, you could easily find someone else to do the job. You are not limited to just one location or country. You have access to a lot of freelancers and virtual assistants.

7: Virtual Employees Work Hard To Justify Their Pay

Unlike your everyday regular employees, virtual employees don’t enjoy the freedom and job security by signing a contract. You pay them on a daily or monthly basis. If you aren’t sure if they are doing their jobs, you could replace them or place them in a different department to increase the overall productivity.

Virtual employees are aware of this and many virtual employee profiles are monitored by their companies that keep track of their work efficiency and progress.

Adding dedication and love for the work they do, a virtual employee will blow your regular workforce out of the water. That too at probably the half of what you actually pay your regular full-time employees.

8: Suitable For Startups, Mid-Scale Businesses, and Big Corporations

The nature of hiring virtual assistants is very attractive. You don’t have to spend too much money, you get a plethora of options when it comes to choosing the right VA for your job and you can easily hire anyone from any part of the world just by Googling for a few minutes.

This takes away a lot of stress and loss of time from the hiring process. When you are running a startup, you cannot afford to waste time on researching. You should be working on growing, generating leads and establishing your brand online.

Hiring virtual assistants not only just solves your hiring problems, but it also helps your scaling your business without breaking the bank.

The ease of running a business backed by a fleet of virtual assistants will ensure the long term success and stability of any business. Our clients enjoy a variety of technical, accounting and management related dedicated services without having to pay more than $50,000/month. That’s $50K of the hard earned money that you could spend on marketing your brand and generating leads.

9: Lead Generation

The secret behind new businesses cracking the 7-figures benchmark – Lead Generation. But, unlike other marketing channels, lead generation needs a lot of experience to actually work. If you scare off a prospect, they might never consider you again. That’s where virtual assistants come into play.

With a single virtual assistant, you could generate a lot of leads for your business. From signing up for a trial to meeting you in a face to face meeting, lead generation can bring in more clients than any other traditional business growth methods.

But, you could also use bulk emailing cloud solutions to send 1 million emails in a single day. Why should you hire a virtual assistant to get this same job done?

Well, for any lead generation campaign to actually work, you need to send personalized emails to qualified prospects. Prospects that are actually interested in your services and products. Sending marketing emails to random stranger online will result in your business domain name getting blacklisted by Spam protection services and even some mobile carriers.

To achieve this, you need a dedicated virtual assistant so dig up the contact details of interested people, craft personalized emails specific to solving their industry problem and engaging them in future conversation.

Lead generation also includes contacting customers on social media platforms and business directories. This cannot be achieved by just sending 1 million emails a day.

10: Distributing Workload With Confidence

Imagine this: You are running a successful business. You make a few grand a month in profits and everything is going according to your plan. But, your marketing team’s efforts started paying off and all of a sudden, you see a sudden surge of client requests and questions.

Your regular employees won’t be able to handle this must stress. In this case, you are left with two options – Either turn down high-paying clients or hire more people to handle the workload for a short amount of time. Keep in mind: this is just temporary.

So, you don’t want to hire full-time employee and then let them off after a month. It will cost a lot of money and most professionals may not agree to work in this situation. All things considered, you can’t blame them.

So, you get a team of virtual assistants like WoodBows and let us handle all the stress and workload. Our team consists of accountants, web designers, software engineers, customer support execs and marketing specialists. Be it 100 or 1000, we’ll be able to handle a majority of your sudden fluctuation without breaking a sweat.

Summary

In today’s’ world, you can’t just rely on your full-time employees to run your whole business. When you have so many talented and hardworking people looking for opportunities, spending too much of hiring inexperienced employees is not the best of business decisions. Today, more than half of the world is using the power of remote work and working from home. VA industry comes with great potential.

When you have team management software and tools like TeamWork and Zoho Projects, managing and running a team of virtual assistants is not that difficult. If you are not willing to manage them all, you can ask one of your full-time employees to manage them all for you.

Let us know what you think of this article by sending us a message. If you are interested in hiring us, don’t waste any more time searching for a suitable virtual assistant. Click on the contact us button and let’s get started today.