Small business owners must wear many hats, especially web designers! Project design, management, marketing, customer service, training, and support are a few things involved in a website design.
You may work alone or have a team, but there are several ways outsourcing to a virtual assistant can help you grow your business while giving you time back in your week, and even giving you the support to actually take some time off!
Customer Service
Before someone outside of your organization can provide service to your customers, there will need to be some conversations and a little training to ensure they are responding in your voice and to your expectations. Think of how much time you can save after this initial training period!
Here are some specific things your VA can do for you, every day and while you’re on vacation:
- Follow up on emails and return calls
- Design and implement a customer onboarding process
- Maintain customer service during design projects – weekly and project milestone updates
- Contact customer when info is needed
- Alert you when you need to step in (spoiler alert – it’s not all the time)
Design Help
It is possible to help with website design without being a coding expert. If you work with a VA that has some basic design, CMS experience, or even just a little tech savvy they should be able to help you with the following:
- Help build out pages to finalize designs
- Research photos and color schemes
- Edit photos and videos as needed
Content
This section will vary depending on your VA’s strengths, and even if there is something they’re not familiar with, they will probably be willing to learn. You won’t know unless you ask!
- Keyword research
- Content outlines
- Ghostwriting
- Proofreading and editing
- Building pages in CMS
- Source and work with freelance writers
Training
Your clients will need training using their new CMS, this can be video and/or documents. Creating these for each new website can be time-consuming.
You can work with your VA to create a generic set of documents that your VA can then personalize for each client. You can also create a set of steps you want your VA to cover during an onscreen video.
With a little preparation, your VA can:
- Create training videos for clients
- Serve as support during the client training period
- Help you identify holes and issues in your training that need to be addressed
Follow Up
Testimonials are a fantastic marketing tool! Are you taking advantage of them? Your client loves their new website, how often do you ask them for a testimonial?
It’s true for a lot of businesses, once you’ve completed a project you’re moving on to the next and don’t really have time to follow up with your previous client.
Here are more ways a VA can help:
- Set up a system for follow-ups
- Collect testimonials and client photos
- Post testimonials to your website
- Update marketing materials with testimonials
- Set up a system that makes it easy and beneficial for clients to send you referrals
- Give you updates when you’re back from vaca 😉
So, there you have it! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when exploring outsourcing.
You may find one virtual assistant that can do all of these things, or you may want to work with a few people, but anyway you look at it; a virtual assistant can be a huge asset to your business, your sanity, and your free time.
Not sure you’re ready to outsource? Try these time management tips first to see if that’s what you need to scale your business.
Know you need to do something different, but having a hard time getting started? Check out this post on procrastination for some tips to beat it.
Not sure how to pay a virtual assistant? Check out these tips to save and budget so you can have what you really want and need to grow your business.
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