5 Tips For Delegating Content Marketing to Your Virtual Assistant
At Trusty Oak, we believe that we can all keep growing. That’s why we offer a variety of webinars, blogs, and events for our Virtual Assistants (VAs) and clients to learn, grow, and improve their craft. In order to keep growing, we often lean into another core value: collaboration always wins. When it comes to learning and growing, we often look to the people we know best to teach us. Here, clients and VAs collaborate to bring fresh ideas, tried-and-true practices, and different perspectives.
Recently, we collaborated with our client Lindsey Bowshier, a web marketing strategist and the president of the Boise-based web marketing agency Tribute Media. Lindsey has over a decade of experience and recently joined us to share some helpful tips in our webinar, Content Marketing You Can Delegate to Your Virtual Assistant. Read on for valuable knowledge about content marketing and how you and your VA can make the most of your partnership.
Content marketing refers to the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience–and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. This can include blog posts, website content (like evergreen and pillar pages), and digital downloads (such as e-books, case studies, infographics, videos, and more). Content is marketed through social media sharing, email, search engine optimization (SEO), and digital ads. If you are creating content, it’s important to put it in front of your audience. Trusty Oak is committed to helping our clients grow and collaborate more effectively with their virtual assistant.
5 Tips for Delegating Content Marketing to Your Virtual Assistant
1. Help Your VA Learn Your Audience and Your Voice
When it comes to creating and sharing content, it’s best to know who your audience is, and when it comes to positioning yourself as a thought leader in your field, it’s important to know who you want to be so that your VA can accurately represent your voice and tone. Creating buyer personas can lead to a more detailed understanding of the goals and motivations of your potential customers. Buyer personas make it easier for you and your VA to identify ideal customers, where they spend their time online, what problems they are trying to solve, and other details about their lives. Then, provide your VA with the research and information they need to present an authoritative voice in the content they create. To communicate your voice to your VA effectively, you can share video and audio files, other content you have created, and different experts in your field. Overall, you’ll be helping your VA create content that is relevant and informative and that drives customer action.
2. Give Your VA the Tools They Need To Succeed
There is an abundance of free and paid tools available online, especially in the business world. To help your VA easily and efficiently create content, you may want to find the tools that work best for creation, communication, and marketing. Cloud-based documents and storage sites such as Google Drive and DropBox make sharing and editing content in a collaborative space much easier than the endless email chains many of us are used to. Apps like Loom help you share and communicate your thoughts more easily and directly, while Grammarly enables continuous real-time spell-and-grammar check capabilities to most websites. Graphic creation software like Canva and video-editing software like Wistia enable your VA to create content with ease. Of course, having the right tools doesn’t just mean having the right applications and software. It’s important to make sure that your VA also has all of the data and resources you can offer them, such as target keywords, knowledge of competitors and collaborators, written style guides, and visual brand guidelines. The more tools provided to your VA, the better they will be able to make creative online content to be shared, and the easier it will be to delegate future tasks to them.
3. Plan Your Content Together
It can be largely beneficial to bring your VA into your content planning process, especially once they have a better understanding of your industry and content guidelines. Evergreen content can be planned for the long term (up to a year at a time!), and it should focus on your core offerings. Topic clusters and other organizational tools can help you create a plan that keeps content creation consistent and provides your VA with a clear framework to structure their content creation. Trending content is much more spontaneous and can’t be extensively planned out. Creating content relevant to trending topics can yield large amounts of traffic, given that it’s posted in a timely manner. Trending content is all about the moment, and trying to plan around that moment can lead many to miss it. Planning with your VA for future content helps you delegate tasks more efficiently and brings your VA into your process, enabling a more synergistic relationship.
Related: Get Things Done by Partnering With Your Virtual Assistant
4. Get The Most Out of Your Content and Your VA-Client Relationship
Creating marketing content does not have to be a one-time solution in which you create it, share it, and move on. Most content can be expanded, broken apart, and transformed to create new content for different audiences and contexts. Getting the most out of your content may mean that you take several smaller pieces and combine them into a larger project, or that you take previously written content and share in a new format, such as a video or infographic. Marketing content can be redirected to drive toward a different outcome or shared on different platforms in varying ways. Delegating in new and different ways can boost your reach and grow your relationship with your VA. Your content, and your VA-Client partnership, is an investment that can yield huge benefits for everyone involved.
5. Be Clear and Direct About Communication, Especially with Time-tracking, Deadlines, and Required Skill Sets
It’s important to have clear goals and expectations for what you need the most help with, and Trusty Oak is committed to matching you with one or more VAs best suited to help you. A VA hired for blogging should be a strong and fast writer, but they may not be the best option for creating and editing video content to go with it. Trusty Oak will happily spread the workaround to provide you with fractional support and to ensure that your needs are being met by skilled and knowledgeable VAs. Communicate to your VA exactly what you want them to accomplish or create, and decide ahead of time how long something should take. Clear and direct communication will lead to better delegation and maximize the efficacy of your relationship with your VA.
Online marketing content has become an essential part of running a business with an online presence. Effective delegation can take your relationship with your VA to the next level and result in better content creation, planning, and distribution. Trusty Oak is committed to providing our clients with the right VA for the right job and ensuring that we can all succeed and keep growing.
Ready to learn more about working with a Trusty Oak virtual assistant?
Justin is passionate about educating and helping himself and those around him grow and develop. He is interested in finding ways to help those in need through his work. He is looking for opportunities to make the world a better place by supporting those in leadership positions and he views his role with Trusty Oak as an opportunity to experience and learn more about a variety of industries and people.