Manage Business Better with an Online Personal Assistant
Pamela Salon
AVP for Sales and Marketing at Syntactics, Inc. | Digital Marketing | Web Design & Development | Custom Software | Virtual Assistant
Working with an online personal assistant can take away hours off your workload. They also provide administrative assistance so you can have more hours per week to focus on essential tasks. With the number of online personal assistants growing at a noticeable rate, it is now easier to find someone who fits your organization standards. Let us discuss some of the skills and traits that you should expect from an online personal assistant.
What is an Online Personal Assistant?
Most online personal assistants (or dedicated virtual assistants) are contractors or freelancers who work at home. They mainly focus on administrative tasks that a local executive assistant or office secretary would do, which are often laborious and time-consuming. Some online sites specialize in linking employers and freelancers and have talent listings for online personal assistants.
There are existing trusted companies or agencies that provide online assistant and virtual assistant services. They cater to clients or companies looking for company-based online assistants that offer more skills and resources whenever needed and not rely on one staff alone. Often, company-based virtual assistants have continuous training, backup, and contingency staff. All the salaries and benefits are already managed for them. Thus, making them focus more on the tasks assigned by the client.
Entrepreneurs can use virtual personal assistants anywhere across the globe for any task. Whether it’s making service calls, customer service, and customer support to sending out invites and thank you emails and support emails to prospective clients. However, knowing which tasks to delegate can be very tricky and challenging. It is also vital that both parties consider building trust and confidence. Similar to how a full-time employee would with his or her employer.
What to Expect When Hiring an Online Personal Assistant?
Keeping an account on pending payments, outstanding invoices, unpaid bills, and other essential bookkeeping matters can be one of the easiest things you can assign to a virtual personal assistant. Many companies choose to share their information with their trusted dedicated virtual assistant, who then follows up on such tasks.
An online personal assistant is also capable of reporting and data presentation. Creating a good and clear PowerPoint presentation, an exciting video, or summarizing research findings in a document, all from raw data, can be a huge time-saver when preparing or setting up for meetings if you get your dedicated virtual assistant to work on it.
Customer satisfaction should be one of your main goals when running a business. As such, you should have a virtual assistant who is an expert in customer service. Aside from that, as part of their support email task, they should filter out your emails and respond to the rest on your behalf. Just make sure that you guide them initially on how to pick out important emails and ask them to copy or consult with you before sending out any replies to reduce, if not eliminate errors.
Another skill that you can expect from an online personal assistant is their capability to manage your websites. Most professional dedicated virtual assistants are already familiar with content management system (CMS) platforms such as WordPress, Magento, Volusion, Kentico. Moreover, some virtual assistants also know the basics of web designing. So, while your dedicated virtual assistant manages your site, they can also continuously improve its aesthetics.
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Today, more and more people spend their time on social media and the internet, in general. As such, online marketing should be an integral part of your marketing efforts. Thus, you should find a dedicated virtual assistant who knows how to maximize business potential with online marketing, specifically social media marketing. Aside from that, they should also know the technicalities in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that your web content ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
You can easily forward Internet data mining to virtual personal assistants. Usual requests related to this include finding information on business websites or exploring new products. They can also research information on trends and check out potential employees or business partners. Similarly, virtual assistants are also savvy and resourceful in booking flights and hotels and mapping travel itineraries for both business and pleasure. When looking for travel options, they can also deal with the hassle of navigating time zones.
Keeping databases updated is a suitable task for an online personal assistant, whether it is encoding new business cards acquired at an event or updating information details for existing contacts. Just make sure to be very specific about your needs and expectations, so there’s less room for errors. Ensuring that the dedicated virtual assistant has done this work can help before you delegate the task.
There are many scheduling tools available online that virtual personal assistants can use to manage the calendars of their clients. These schedules can range from meeting invitations, scheduling appointments to assisting in the planning of corporate events. They can even remind you of your personal appointments and other personal tasks to do for that day or week.
Dedicated virtual assistants can also create content for social media and websites, including written content such as articles, blog content, press releases, slide content, and ads. As such, periodical content updates for your company website should be easy for your dedicated virtual assistant. Some are also knowledgeable in administrative writing and article submission to different online directories. If you are lucky, you can find a dedicated virtual assistant who also knows how to create promotional video content.
With limited time in keeping up with industry trends and updates, some companies turn to virtual personal assistants to keep tabs on the latest happenings. Executives then use this information to update their social media channels and present exciting industry updates in conversation with customers and potential clients to build trust and confidence.
Find the Right Online Personal Assistant for Your Business!
In a world full of online personal assistants, hiring one for your small business or company can make a huge difference — whether in your business procedures or even in your personal life. As such, should you need to?hire a dedicated virtual assistant , you can contact Syntactics, Inc. anytime. Let us know how our dedicated virtual assistants can be of help to you and your business!