female virtual assistant - happily reporting for work

What Does a Virtual Assistant Do?

21 Tasks You Can Outsource

A virtual assistant is a remote employee who can help you with your routine tasks and serve multiple functions if you need help in various aspects of your business.

They provide administrative support and can serve multiple functions for your business. 

They are often paid an hourly rate and are the perfect remote work packages for entrepreneurs who want to grow without having to risk higher overhead costs.

You can read more if you want to find out what specific tasks you can offshore to your VA. 

What is a virtual assistant?

outsourced bookkeeping - what constitutes the best in outsourcing?

Importance of Having a Virtual Assistant

You should be the one who decides what tasks you want to delegate.

In fact, the way your business is run is yours.

But in hiring a VA, you are able to focus on the income-generating activities rather than being stuck on the repetitive work that can be handled by someone else.

It is important to have a VA so that you are able to focus on more important tasks.

You can outsource things like writing content, transcriptions, proofreading, and even customer support tasks like answering emails and phone calls.

All things that can be delegated to someone else that doesn’t really need the experience that you do. This will allow you to focus on the things that you can do best.

What Tasks Can You Outsource to a Virtual Assistant?

General Virtual Assistant Tasks

1. Email management

This is vital.

If you’re going to be working with a lot of clients, you may or may not have emails that generate leads!

Hiring a VA to get these things organized can go a long way in making sure that your work is done in a timely manner and that you can attend to valid email concerns.

2. Taking calls

When you’re asleep and when someone calls who’s going to attend to them?

A virtual assistant can allow you to make certain that all of your leads are coming in and every possible client is attended to.

They can take calls and make sure your stakeholders are satisfied.

3. File management

These can get rather sticky if you’ve had a lot of files and photos on your computer and you can’t keep track of them.

These very menial tasks are something you may ignore but having them taken care of by a good VA can go a long way in establishing a streamlined workflow.

4. Customer follow-ups and questions

After you’ve closed a sale, you may want to keep track of how a customer is doing.

Customer follow-ups can also be advantageous in that they can allow you to get feedback from your clients and make the necessary changes to your operations if there is ever a need to.

5. Social media posting and updating your account

If you’re selling on Instagram or Facebook, then your VA can very well attend to these and even perform customer service tasks such as live chat support.

They can connect you with customers in a more intimate way.

If you train them about your product or service, VA’s can very well take center stage when new requests are coming in so you can focus on research and development.

6. Copywriting

If you need sales and marketing copy, you can find a savvy VA to write these for you.

A good virtual assistant takes in your brand and knows how to present it to pending customers.

7. Project management

Project management is one of the highest functions you can assign to a virtual assistant.

If they are able to liaise between you and fellow employees, colleagues, and clients, it will create a much faster pipeline.

You can make them into co decision-makers or they’ll give you a summary of transactions, customer behavior, Google analytics, and other updates on your timeline which allow you to make more efficient operational choices.

Real Estate Virtual Assistant Tasks

8. Filling in your MLS forms

Your MLS is important for tracking prices and properties.

If you had to encode them all the time you can no longer focus on sales.

This is why a really good real estate VA can take over these administrative functions to ensure these are done properly.

9. Follow-ups with tenants and homebuyers

If you’ve finished a sale? Great! But follow-ups with any other product and service are paramount.

You want to make sure your clients are all settled in their new home and that they’re satisfied with what you’re giving them.

Plus, if they have any concerns regarding the property, they can just tell your VA.

10. Research

Performing market research is important.

You’re the only one know knows the behaviors and preferences of people locally.

But tracking leads and performing background research into tenants can be highly valuable in the long run.

11. Bookkeeping

If you’ve got them doing your MLS, then you can assign them basic data entry tasks such as bookkeeping and keeping records.

They can also help you track your finances faster if you’re willing to get them to check out your finances and help you keep basic track of things.

12. Email management

If you’re a realtor you’re bound to get a lot of emails and messages.

Sorting through these can be hell.

Your VA can assist you with attending to the emails that matter and trashing those which don’t.

13. Appointment Setting

This is probably the most crucial task in real estate.

Learning to manage and set your appointments can go a long way in closing sales and it will make your home buyers happier!

 Marketing Virtual Assistant Tasks

Your sales is something of paramount of importance. It makes sense then that you can hire a marketing virtual assistant to help you achieve your quotas.

14. Outbound calls

You can get your VA to make cold calls and prospecting. You can do the selling yourself but having an administrative assistant sift through possible leads for you can absolutely give you much more freedom in this regard.

15. Social media posting and chat support

If you’ve got a social media channel, your virtual assistant can help you keep your posts up to date. Manage your campaigns and hiring a virtual assistant full time can give you that much more freedom. If you have an admin who can follow your tone of voice, that is all the more advantageous for your work.

16. Filtering questions and comments

If you had so many comments and questions coming in, it’s almost impossible to censor them. So getting your admin to filter these out can serve tremendous value in allowing you to gain more leverage and figure out which of these leads are more sensible and useful customers.

17. Lead generation

Lead gen is one of the crucial tasks of marketing virtual assistants. They can point you to prospects of people who may make a purchase. And over time, your lead gen processes can be transformed into conversions.

18. Copywriting

Copy or content writing is a part of your blog posting and content marketing strategies. Good VA’s ought to have the skill in communicating your brand. And some exceptional VA’s can even copy your writing style and sound like you!

19. Graphic design

Occasionally, you can fuse the functions of graphic designers and web developers into the work of a V.A. And you can hire graphic designers and repurpose them into your graphic designers which fits into your whole funnel of content marketing.

Key Takeaways

You’re going to find out that many of the tasks we listed above overlap.

And there isn’t a cut-and-dry picture of a virtual assistant.

But in general, if you hire a VA whether that’s for general purposes or for marketing?

There are remote employees who can take care of your work for you and make sure you meet your pipelines.

The tasks a VA can do also depend on what you need!

There are many ways to customize your remote staffing solutions and we’d be glad to talk to you when you’re ready to hire a virtual assistant.


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