Are you confused? What virtual assistant services you should offer or which services are in demand to make the most out of it?
Trust me; you are not alone. A majority of new virtual assistants face this dilemma.
No wonder, as there are tons of services to offer, it’s so overwhelming to decide which one to offer.
It’s always a good idea to start with those services which you are good at in the beginning. But to become a successful virtual assistant, you should know which services are in demand.
You should understand the needs of your clients. Try to find a balance between the services you are offering and what the client is expecting from you.
The virtual assistant industry is very dynamic. The changes are quite drastic.
As the new startups are focusing more on digital marketing, data analytics, and market research. You need to keep pace with these changes to stay ahead in the industry.
What are the emerging segments in VA? Here are the 22+ virtual assistant services which are in great demand:
Administrative Services
These are the most primary services that an entrepreneur or a startup wants to outsource from an administrative virtual assistant.
1. Basic Data Entry Services
Every business whether it is real estate, logistics, or E-commerce has to deal with lots of data. It is a very daunting task for them so they look for a smart solution in the form of virtual assistants. The basic data entry services include tasks like:
- Keeping records of accounts, sales, dispatches, contacts, bills, etc.
- Enter data into the central system or software (CRM).
- Processing forms and documents.
- Creating reports and presentations.
- Check the accuracy of databases
- Maintaining all records in proper files and folders.
2. Answering Phone Calls and Emails
These are the very basic services related to business communication that you can offer as a virtual assistant.
- Sending and answering emails and chats.
- Making and receiving phone calls from suppliers, customers, and business partners.
- Handling customer’s queries and solving problems
- Follow-up with suppliers.
- Tracking shipments.
- Managing auto-responders.
- Maintaining proper records of all important conversations.
3. Organizing
In every business, there are several crucial tasks that need to be in proper sequence, here a remote assistant can save a lot of time for business owners which gives them the elbow room to focus on planning and business strategy.
- Scheduling daily activities and calendar.
- Scheduling social media posts and tweets.
- Organizing files and documents.
- Booking hotels and flights.
- Ordering online.
- Making a budget.
- Keep note of the anniversary, birthday, and other important events.
4. Scheduling Meetings and Appointments
On a routine business day, there are lots of appointments and meetings lined up, a VA can help to manage and arrange them properly.
- Planning meetings, appointments, and events.
- Sending invitations.
- Making reservations.
5. Making PowerPoint Presentations and Slides
An entrepreneur is always over-occupied with operational tasks, here a VA can be very handy for making presentations and slides.
- Choosing relevant templates
- Finding images and fonts
- Collecting data
- Doing research on topics like – sales, product, or branding strategy.
- Arranging slides or pages in the proper order of presentation.
6. Email Management
Checking and responding to daily emails eat away a lot of valuable time of business owners. A virtual assistant can take away this burden by managing emails.
- Responding to emails
- Sending newsletters
- Maintaining multiple email accounts.
- Flagging important emails
- Cleaning spam folder
- Maintaining to-do list
- Maintaining email lists
7. Travel Assistant
A travel assistant makes all arrangements for travel, accommodation, and car rentals for business trips and vacations.
- Booking flights, cabs, restaurants, and hotels.
- Booking business trips and vacations.
- Getting passport and visa approvals.
- Tracking all travel bills and invoices
- Making a list of places to visit and shopping.
- Travel-related data entry.
8. Document Management
It includes storing, tracking, sharing, and editing documents digitally. A remote assistant is needed to:
- Creating, formatting, and editing documents in MS Word, and MS Excel.
- Converting word to PDF or Excel to PDF.
- Scanning documents
- Transcription
- Google documents and Google Drive
- Proofreading
- Dropbox
Related Post: How to become a virtual assistant
Managing Finances (Bookkeeping)
Indeed, it is true that a small business owner wears many hats, and one of them is managing money or accounting.
But as the business grows, they had to focus more on core operations, in that case, they can rely on a virtual assistant for bookkeeping tasks.
A virtual bookkeeper can do the following tasks:
1. Keep track of your expenses and bills.
2. Ledger entry in your books of accounts, and bookkeeping.
3. Reconciliation of bank statements.
4. Creating a budget.
5. Organizing bank statements and bills.
6. Make purchases and place orders for you.
7. Generating invoices.
8. Payroll processing.
9. Setting up business payments.
10. Help in tax calculations.
11. Filing VAT return and corporate tax.
Transcription Services
In legal and medical businesses most of the data are in the form of audio or video files, which need to be accurately converted into text form. It is called transcription.
A virtual assistant can do transcription work from a remote location based on his/her specialized skills in medical and legal terminologies.
Most popular transcription services:
- Legal transcription
- Medical transcription
- Webinars transcription
- Video captioning
- Podcast transcription
- Transcription of online courses
Technical Services
There are many technical tasks that are critical for a business, especially if it is an online business.
If you have technical knowledge in the space of website development, then you can offer these services.
- Setting up a website on WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace.
- Customizing website and coding.
- Installing plugins.
- Search engine optimization
- Setting up landing pages.
- Sales funnel and lead generation.
- Setting up webinars.
- Setting up email newsletters services.
- Setting up an e-commerce website and online shop.
- Creating graphics for the website.
- Technical support and troubleshooting.
Social Media Management
Today’s consumers are very smart, before buying anything they first check out its social media reviews and visit the company’s Facebook or Twitter pages.
For this reason, every business owner had to maintain their online presence through social media to build a strong brand to drive more sales.
But it requires consistent creation of content and sharing online which takes too much time, and here the social media virtual assistant comes into the picture.
What a social media virtual assistant do:
1. Creating social media posts, content, and graphics.
2. Scheduling posts on the most engaging time at which the target audience is online.
3. Responding to the comments of fans and followers.
4. Analyzing social engagement data – demographics of the audience – age, income, and, preferences.
5. Managing multiple social media accounts.
6. Grow fans and followers.
7. Collaborate with other influencers in the same space.
8. Creating ad campaigns like Facebook and Instagram ads.
9. Creating contests, quizzes, and giveaways to engage the audience.
Blog Management
Nowadays blogging is a core component of the marketing strategy of businesses to reach out to the target audience and to build a brand.
But it demands a lot of extra work in the form of content creation. Here the virtual assistant comes to the rescue of small businesses.
Services to offer:
1. Research blog post ideas.
2. Content creation – coming out with new blog post ideas and writing high-quality content.
3. Finding relevant images for blog posts, and creating and editing images.
4. Drafting, formatting, scheduling, and publishing blog posts
5. Doing keyword research and SEO for a better ranking on Google.
6. Finding guest post opportunities on other related blogs.
7. Content marketing.
8. Managing newsletters to engage the audience.
9. Replying to comments.
10. social media sharing.
Pinterest VA
Pinterest is much more than a usual social media platform; it is more of a visual search engine. As there are many female entrepreneurs out there who need Pinterest-related specialized services.
Some of these entrepreneurs are selling handmade crafts, printables, clothing, and home décor items. For marketing, they need to make eye-catching pins to get more buyers.
This creates some great opportunities for a Pinterest VA, they can offer services like:
- Create eye-catching pins.
- Creating niche-specific boards.
- Scheduling pins.
- Manual pinning.
- Getting more followers.
- Optimizing Pinterest profiles with target keywords.
- Enabling rich pins.
- Setting up Tailwind.
- Getting access to new group boards or tribes.
- Doing Pinterest SEO with keyword-rich descriptions to pins and boards.
Event Management Services
In business, there are many events like annual meetings, vendor meetings, and conferences. An event management assistant can help to conduct each event successfully.
Main tasks like:
- Sending invitations
- Arranging travel, accommodation, and catering.
- Booking venue
- Planning events within the budget
- Scheduling the activities of the event
Research Services
To grow a business, an entrepreneur is always looking for new markets, products, and services which involves a lot of research.
As the completion heats up, a business needs more leads to grow its sales, for that research plays a crucial role, by hiring a remote assistant this task can be done more efficiently.
Doing research about:
1. New products and services launched by competitors
2. Analyzing new consumer trends in the market
3. Conducting surveys
4. Creating a database
5. Finding new markets
6. Lead generation
7. Collecting data from government research, trade associations, news, census, and other research publications.
8. Finding business partners, niche websites for advertisement, and affiliates to market products and services.
Customer Service
Customer service is the backbone of any business because a customer had many questions in his mind about the products or services. A business should be capable to handle all of these problems and queries.
But as discussed earlier, here also the owner cannot focus on each and every aspect of the business, and customer service is not an exception.
As the business scale up, they get more customer calls and queries. And an entrepreneur wants a customer service virtual assistant who can deal with problems of customers like – tracking shipments, payments, refunds, and product or service-related queries.
- Answering customers’ queries on using products and services.
- Customer Support – handling emails, voice mails, chat, or phone support.
- Order processing and credit card payment processing.
- Maintaining customer database and CRM.
- Helping customers in arranging shipments and processing invoices and documentation.
- Handling refunds, returns, and cancellations of orders.
- Order tracking
- Feedbacks from customer
Lead Generation
An entrepreneur is constantly looking for new customer and lead generation become a tough nut to crack, this daunting task can be outsourced to a virtual assistant.
These are some of the lead generation services that a VA can offer:
- Making cold calls & email marketing.
- Getting leads from LinkedIn marketing.
- Setting landing pages.
- Social media ads.
- Market research.
- Prospective customer database management.
- Participating in forums.
- Collaborating with influencers.
- Freebies and giveaways in exchange for an email address.
SEO Virtual Assistant
Website ranking is very crucial in internet marketing, and business owners don’t have the time and skills for search engine optimization (SEO). An SEO virtual assistant can help an entrepreneur in the following ways:
- Ranking websites on search engines
- Optimizing website for better ranking on search engines
- Keyword research
- Link building
- Content marketing
- Social media sharing
- Submitting a sitemap to leading search engines
- Google analytics setup
- Yoast setup
Graphics Designing
In the graphic designing space, there are many tasks that are mundane and eat away a lot of time. On the other hand, some designing tasks require special skills and expertise.
The most reliable solution to this problem is to hire a graphic design virtual assistant. The tasks which a graphics virtual assistant can do:
1. logo designing.
2. Creating a banner header.
3. Making an image template.
4. Creating Infographics.
5. Business cards and invitation cards.
6. Brochure and letterheads.
7. Image editing.
8. Creating social media images.
9. Designing an eBook cover page.
10. Website designing.
Medical Virtual Assistant
In the medical field, doctors and therapists also need a helping hand to manage their patient’s records, appointments, and transcription of medical records.
A medical virtual assistant can take of this workload by providing services like:
- Organizing patients’ medical records and files.
- Data entry of new and existing patients.
- Scheduling appointments and therapy sessions.
- Answering calls and receptionist tasks
- Follow-ups and send reminders to patients.
- Handling billing, receivables, and payments.
- Processing payroll.
- Medical transcription.
- Tracking medical bulletins and journals.
Final Thoughts
Wrapping it up, there is no limit to the services you can offer under your virtual assistant umbrella. First, figure out skills that fit best among the above services.
Focus on your core areas of strength and become an expert in your niche to command higher rates.
Identify some niche areas like Pinterest or graphic designing, and become an expert in it.
Then create a list of services you can offer by keeping in mind the demands of business owners. Be open-minded to learn new skills to expand your offerings by taking online courses on udemy and other platforms.
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