How Virtual Assistants Can Grow Your Business & Reduce Your Risk of Failure
When you start your own business, you learn very early on that it’s nothing like having a normal 9-5 job. Finding the balance between actually doing the work your clients hired you to do, communicating with clients, and trying to find new clients can be overwhelming and consume all your waking hours. If you’re working seven days a week, from the start of your day to late into the night, and still go to sleep fretting over everything you haven’t gotten done yet, you could benefit from hiring a virtual assistant.
What Virtual Assistants Can Do For You
Virtual assistants are essentially the internet version of having a personal assistant. Virtual assistants help you finish your day-to-day menial tasks, repetitive chores, and everything else that isn’t actually what you’re paid to do.
Virtual assistants can do practically everything that a personal assistant could do for you: data entry, organizing your documents, sending invoices, collecting payments, answering phone calls, and far more. You might be thinking that a virtual assistant can’t do in-person tasks, like picking up your dry cleaning, which is true. But a virtual assistant can probably do even more than a personal secretary could; many specialize in web design, social media, blogging, and more.
Additionally, virtual assistants are far more flexible than in-person personal assistants. A personal assistant generally has to have a set schedule, a promise of a certain number of working hours per week, and a physical location they can come to to do their work. If you’re working out of your home or in a location that’s not equipped for phone and internet services, a personal assistant is just not practical. 
Virtual assistants are extraordinarily flexible, generally being hired on a weekly retainer or hour-to-hour basis. You can have them work for you when you need them, and add on more hours if it’s necessary. This can keep your costs down and prevent you from having too little work for an assistant to do during the hours you’ve already promised them payment for.
Social Media Outreach
While favored social media networks change from time to time, there’s no debating that social media is here to stay. Facebook has reached nearly 1.5 billion users, and Twitter has nearly 1 billion itself. With that many people on social media networks, not using those networks to promote your business is a big mistake.
Still, getting a message across to your followers can be a difficult task all on your own. For each follower you have, your updates compete with dozens or even hundreds of updates coming from their friends and other “Liked” pages. Due to this, simply updating once in a while isn’t enough to really get your message across.
Regular, frequent updates about your company are the best way to keep your customers involved and thinking about you. While this would be an exhausting task to tack on top of your existing business responsibilities, a virtual assistant can easily take it off your hands.
Virtual assistants that specialize in social media outreach can not only update for you, but they can also stay alert to Facebook trending topics and find ways to incorporate those into your posts for maximum exposure.
Additionally, many companies are now beginning to address customer questions and complaints directly through social media, from small businesses to giant corporations like Walmart and Starbucks. Having a virtual assistant tending to your social media pages means that questions will be answered quickly, disgruntled customers will be soothed, and new leads will come in without you having to lift a finger.
Email Response Time
As consumers get accustomed to lightning-fast internet speeds and quick replies on social media, they’re less willing to wait around for responses to older forms of communication, like email. While email marketing is frequently used to spread word to former customers and interested parties, if replies roll in to your inbox and someone isn’t ready to respond, customers may move on or look to competitors.
As with social media, virtual assistants are great for answering and filtering your emails. Extremely important emails can be passed along to you, but everything else from SPAM to potential clients with frequently asked questions can be taken care of by a friendly, well-written and persuasive virtual assistant.
Stress, Lack of Sleep, And Your Health
Having a virtual assistant isn’t just about delegating time-consuming tasks to another person so you can spend more time working on what only you can do. It’s also about giving you back your personal time and rest.
Stress and sleep depravation are horrible for your overall health, your mind’s clarity, and your resistance to illnesses. A lack of sleep can increase your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and even affect your memory and reaction time. An excess of stress only makes the risk of these illnesses even higher.
Even if you’re managing to get everything you need done by yourself, being stricken with one of these illnesses or even being at a higher risk of catching the common cold can throw your business into disarray. Without you, your business can’t run; if hiring a virtual assistant means you’re protecting your health, it’s well worth it.
Conclusion
Hiring a virtual assistant is an affordable and flexible way to maintain good communication with your customers and to find new customers, too. Instead of struggling to maintain what you’ve achieved, you can take more time for yourself and see your business flourish more than you could going at it alone.
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/many-twitter-users-dont-tweet-finds-report/
https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/effects-of-stress-on-your-body
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/not-enough-sleep-7-serious-health-risks?page=4
https://www.hometownstation.com/santa-clarita-latest-news/is-customer-service-via-social-media-replacing-phone-and-email-150881
