Virtual Assistant Marketing: How Can You Grab New Clients?
When it comes right down to it, becoming a VA means that you’re going to need a strong sense of marketing. It’s not just about offering marketing services to your clients, it also means that you’re going to need a message that will help you to get people’s attention.
When you participate in VA training with Virtual U, you’ll learn to market your services with statements like this:
Full-time staff might be well trained, but they also require office space and computer hardware, a telephone, demand holidays and it is really hard to find a truly competent administrator that isn’t already snapped up by a corporation or a competitor. It is estimated that full-time staff actually cost an organization three times the annual salary in holidays and benefits! Temporary staffing solutions, meanwhile, come with added stresses – while hiring them for a few hours a week might seem ideal, as soon as a permanent position becomes available you’ll be left with no temp and lots of paperwork.
Virtual Assistants really are a godsend. They only bill for the hours they have worked, come ready-trained, and don’t have the standard overheads that come with fully employed staff such as tax and holiday pay. They make themselves available by utilizing the latest communications technology such as cell phones, instant messaging and email, and have all of the same clerical and conveyance skills of the real-life administrator. Working from home they can also utilize snail mail if necessary, and many even provide web development, desktop publishing and event planning services.
In other words, one of the key marketing points that you have for your virtual assistant business is that you already have the skills that the business oner needs. Each client only will be paying you for the services that you provide and the time that you spend providing them; there won’t be employee taxes, the cost of benefits, or paying a staffing agency to bring in someone who will need to be trained.
That’s the first key to marketing yourself as a VA – selling a client on the benefits of working with you. The next key is to market the skills and services that you have to offer. Whether you offer generalized services or you specialize, you’re going to want to be sure that you’re getting the right message across: it’s the only way that you’ll grab the attention of prospective clients and grow your business.