How to market your Virtual Assistant business

1. Introduction: Welcome to how to market your virtual assistant business. If you're already got a virtual assistant business and you're struggling with marketing, then this is the course for you. I'm going to give you loads of insights into what to do and how to market your business. If you are a beginner, then this is worthwhile going through as well because it gives you all the foundations to make your business successful. So a little bit about me. I'm Donna. I'm your teacher, and I am an expert in virtual assistant business. I have been running one since 2018. Successfully. I've got multiple clients, so I have learned a lot of tips and tricks when it comes to it. I'm also trained in marketing as well, so I know what I'm talking about, and everything that I'm teaching you is beginner level. I'm not going to throw things that are really technical at you. I want to basically give you a course that makes you go away with it and go, Yeah, I know what I need to do, I need to do this, I need to do that. And so I have learned a lot, so I'm going to share with you in this course all of these important things. So first of all, we're going to look at the importance of marketing. Then we're looking at building a website. If you have one, fantastic. I still watch this because there will be some tips and tricks in there that you might not know about. Then we'll look at building a portfolio. Depending on what kind of virtual assistant business you have, it is really important to display what you can do. Then we're going to come across social media marketing, email marketing, paydads networking and the elevator pitch. I'm going to provide you loads of insights into all these types of marketing efforts. When it comes to marketing, you will find that some of these will be really beneficial to you, some that you won't even need to touch. Some people focus solely on social media for the business, some ema marketing, but sometimes people will expand outwards. We're going to go through each of these with some nice useful tips and tricks for you to take away. Let's get started. 2. The importance of marketing: Let's talk about the importance of marketing. As a VA, marketing is going to be an essential way for you to have a successful business. Marketing involves promoting your services, creating brand awareness, and generating leads to acquiring your clients, but this will take time to work out where those clients are and to build up your marketing efforts as well. For example, if you are doing marketing through social media, you need to grow your followers in order to reach more and more people to see the content that you're creating. So here are a few reasons why marketing is important for your VA business. First of all, most important reason, it attracts new clients. By creating an online presence and promoting your skills and expertise, you can increase your chances of attracting new clients, which is fantastic. It will also build your brand as well. Marketing can help you create a unique identity and a brand for your business. By creating a strong brand, you can differentiate from every other VA that's out there in the market and establish a reputation for quality work. Reputation, really matters. It will also establish credibility. Through marketing, you can showcase your skills, your expertise, your accomplishments, which can help establish that credibility with potential clients. You can check customer testimonials, case studies, anything that can demonstrate your ability to basically deliver what certain results. It's really important. It's a way of like showcasing who you are, basically. When you are doing marketing efforts, you do want to be spending some time showcasing what you can do. People tend to buy from people based on their credibility more than anything and their reputation and the reviews. The more content, the more stuff that you can show people, the better it is. Another thing is staying consistent. Regular marketing efforts such as emails, newsletters, social media post, blog articles can help keep your business top of mind with potential and existing clients. By staying visible and relevant, you can increase your chances of being contacted for new projects. Especially with social media, the more relevant you are, the more consistent you are on social media, the more your post get shown. If you aren't consistent and you active accounts, your content won't be shown to people and people will just see your account and think you're not really doing any work, your business isn't running, that type of thing. It's important to always remain consistent and plan out each week what you're going to be doing. So in summary, marketing is such a crucial aspect for you to attract new clients, build a strong brand, establish credibility, and to stay on top of mind for people. I will grow your business. Marketing is one of the best ways to grow any business at the moment. You just need to know how and where to find your audience. 3. Build a website: In this lesson, we're going to cover off building a website. A website is a key thing to have as a VA, as it helps you to establish your online presence and reach those potential clients. A website will help you to showcase your services, your skills, your experience, and provide a platform for potential clients to get in touch with you. You can add contact forms, you can add discovery calls, that kind of thing to your website so people can easy get in touch with you. Here are some steps to get started with building your website. So first of all, you need to define your website's purpose and its goals. Before you start building your website, it's essential to understand the purpose of the website and what you want to achieve from it. Do you want to provide information about your services, showcase your portfolio, or sell your services directly on your website? Figure out what you want to do before you begin because it's so important when you are building a website that you know what you're going to be creating, you don't want to be wasting loads of time building a website to realize, actually, I don't want to add that in. Oh, actually, I'm going to change the entire purpose of the website just to be selling my services directly on the website. So you need to know what you'll be doing with the website. Then you need to think about choosing your domain name. Hopefully, you've done the last lesson, which is all about branding, you actually know what your name is going to be, which is fantastic. Now you need to find the domain name and register for it. You can try Go Daddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains. Have a look, see which ones are available, and then go ahead and purchase them. A lot of them you'll find they'll offer a deal for two years. It works out quite cheaper than just having one year. For some people, it's a good idea depending on the price of their name. I often do it for two years because sometimes you'll get renewal, obviously, after the first year, but it does tend to shoot up in price for the following year. Then you're going to choose your website Builder or platform. This is an important step. You're going to choose to use a website Builder. Or you're going to ask somebody to do it for you. But if you're going to do it yourself, a few websites you can try WDpress, WIX, Squarespace or Weebly. All of these platforms are great for beginners. You can customize the templates, you can add what you want onto it. WordPress is a little bit trickier than the rest, just because there's a lot more to it. I recommend Wix or Weebly if you're really new to website building, it's really easy to put a website together in just a few hours and but they're worth looking too. If you don't know how to build a website, you're really nervous about putting one together. Get a friend to help you or you can ask in some of the Facebook groups or ask your network of people that you know, see if anyone can help you build it. But it is worth having a little go just to see if you can do it yourself because sometimes you realize you can actually do it quite easily, and it's quite fun as well. The next thing when it comes to building a website is actually designing the website. When you're designing it, you can choose a range of templates, but try and reflect your brand and customize it to fit your needs. Don't just pick a template, that's a really cool one, click on. And then not customize it enough for what you want it to do. If you do want to showcase stuff off about what you're capable of doing, try and add pages in about that and try and add as much information about you, your style, add in different color palettes, the ones that you've chosen already, your logo, call to actions, images, reflecting your brand as well. So try and choose images based on you, basically. You can even pop some photos of yourself in it if you really want to. And I always do that on the About page. But yeah, try and make it fit for you and your business. Don't just stick to the general template, just as a guide basically. Then what you need to be doing is creating new content for it very often. Make sure you are creating content that's nice and easy to read and what it will do is it will optimize your website basically on search engines. You're building a brand new website. No one's really going to find it that much unless you market it and you have really good SEO. What what I mean by SEO, it stands for search engine optimization. When you go onto Google and you're typing a phrase of some search term, it pops up with loads of results. That's what SEO does. It builds you up so you can get found on the first page or the second page. When people typing in, for example, if they typed in your name, your website will appear and that's what we want to encourage you to do. So try and make sure that your website is up to date. You're putting new content on there. The best way of doing this is to do a blog. So if you haven't thought about doing one, I would actually recommend doing one. There is a lesson later on down the line all about blogging that I think it's recommended to definitely take note of. It will help your website get found. But everything that you do marketing wise once your website is up and ready, try and point them to your site. So everything should point there once you're up and ready. The last point, I'm just going to test, well, I'm going to mention is test and launch. Before launching your website, test it, test it, test it, test it. Don't go put it out there, telling the whole world about it just in case there is a few things that need to be tweaking. For example, you might find that your website isn't ready for phone. When you go on your phone you're like, wait mint, this website is a bit jumbled. You might have not thought about that. There might be grammar issues, some links might not work, but it's just really important if you are going to launch this, it needs to be perfect because those first impressions, really matter. So what I would recommend when it comes to testing is just send a link to a few friends get their feedback on it, see if they can click on everything, test everything out. If they spot anything, they'll tell you. Most friends do and family or you can send it to select group of people that you already know online, see what they think, and then do a nice big launch, put it on social, put it on there multiple times, your stories, just put it everywhere, basically. So what I will say is remember to focus on your website's purpose and its goals. Always try and try and try to get the website to reflect your brands, showcase as much as you can about what you're capable of, add portfolio, loads of images, loads of links to things. It is basically your CV online, basically for clients. It's really, really important to put as much information on there as possible because people love to read testimonials. They love to find out more about you and why not have a website that does it for you? I hope you have fun creating your website. It is basically your biggest marketing tool out there, spend some time doing this to get it right. Don't be afraid of tweaking things. Don't be afraid of updating it or rebranding it if you don't think it's what it's supposed to be. But all I can say is it will be a fun project for you to finish. 4. Build a portfolio : So let's look at covering a lesson on how to build a portfolio. Building a portfolio can be a great way to showcase your skills and your expertise to potential clients. When you're doing this, you need to select your best examples that you've got to showcase your skills and your achievements as a psi assistant that can include screenshots, case studies, testimonials, anything that you can think that's relevant to creating a portfolio. If you do not have examples and you are brand new, which most of you probably are, then what I would say is create some mock up ones, create some of your own to showcase what you're capable of maybe you can put in your own little case studies of how you've worked on a project in a full time role, but maybe changed the name, that type of thing. But do a mockup until you have got that experience behind you because as dying out, it is hard to create a portfolio with nothing. But if you can potentially show people what you're capable of doing, they'll appreciate seeing it. Here are some steps to help you build a portfolio. So when it comes to creating it, you need to create a professional looking website or you can use a platform like LinkedIn or anything to organize your portfolio. So you need a place to put it. Think about making it really easy to navigate, visually appealing, highlight your strengths and achievements. Some people put it on their own websites. I have mine and mines downloadable PDF, so people can just flick through it. You can use flip five, which is an online tool which creates a link. You can give that link to people and it's like a booklet and you can flip between the pages then flip. But think of a way of how you would present it to potential clients. Make it easy and accessible and always updated as well. The other things that you need to be considering is including a short bio that highlights your experience and personality. Talk about your experience, industries, skills, programs that you know, that type of thing, and then do a bit of a bio about who you are as well as a person. It's quite nice. You can do it in CVs, you've probably done it before. I just adds a bit more personality into the portfolio itself. Um, and the client gets to know who you are as well as an individual, which is really important. If your buyer is talking about how bubbly and you like doing this and this and this, it shows you're very proactive and you're very, very on it with certain things, and it gets a sense for them as well how you work as well. So if you are come across very organized in your portfolio, everything's smart, you know, it reflects the client and they're going, oh, well, that portfolio was really well laid out. You know, the bio I get the sense that this person could be a good fit. So think about your short bio as well. The next point is regularly update portfolio. I can't stress this enough because if some of the things that you've been working on lately are really good, you want to be showcasing their math. You want to make sure they're included in your portfolio. Every time you complete your project or you do something, you're like, Yes, that shows this skill, put in your portfolio, update it. People love to see the active projects you've done and stuff that you can talk about that's up to date and his current as well. If you are talking with potential client about portfolio, they might ask questions and if some of it's quiet, that's two years ago, that was five years ago, if you say, that was last month or I've been working on that for the last 18 months, they know that you're quite active in what you're doing and you're very competent in your skill set. And then the last one is to showcase your results. Don't just list your services, highlight the results you've achieved from your clients as well. This will help them potentially help those clients understand the value that you can bring to a business. If you don't have those results, don't worry too much. This is a little bit later on down the line once you've started to build up those examples, those case studies, you can start highlighting the key information like if you are handling someone's social media account and you've grown it by 10% or something, that's an achievement, put it in your portfolio. It shows that you've done something that's actively worked in the best interest of the business. It's really, really important to put in those results. If you have got some professional experience in full time work and you have been doing that and you put in that to your VA business, use examples as well from previous work that you've done, but you can always just basically say for this company, but I can't name the company, that type of thing. Keep the company name out of it, but you can highlight that in your portfolio. You can say, I've worked for previous businesses and I did this for one business, this for another business, this for another business, but you don't need to name the companies as well, so you can keep them out of it. It just protects your previous employer, and that type of thing because it might be in the contract, you can't actually mention what you've been doing. Yeah, try and use the results. It's one of the best ways for clients go on board with what you're doing. Personally, I would definitely recommend adding this in. So when you think of your portfolio, you need to understand it's a reflection of your skills. You need to spend some quality time building a strong portfolio. It really, really help clients if they want to take the next step or if they're deciding if they want to employ you join you as a client. It's really, really important to create a strong portfolio. However you do it, I would advise making it really professional looking, clean cut, easy to read, quite fun to look through goal. That's really good. You can provide little stippets of information or you can put some of your personality onto it. But it's important to understand it's your portfolio, so you can do it however you want, as long as it showcases who you are. So spend some time doing this. If you go onto things like Canva, for example, there are templates for portfolios. If you just want to do PDF version, spend some time going on to Google. You can type in portfolio examples. I'll provide you some ideas on layouts and things because you want to be actually including a contents page first page so people can go through things and include lots of texts if you can, about what you were doing, how you did it, that type of thing throughout it with lots of images as well. People love images. But yeah, spend some time researching on how to create portfolio if you're really not sure how to stay with this and this is worrying you a little bit. But this is an essential step when it comes to getting your clients. Is it firms up what you're capable of doing basically. So yeah, spend some time, have a look. You can even look on other VAs, websites or go onto some of the Facebook groups like I've mentioned a few times and ask people what their portfolios look like. Ask them, how did you do it? How did you get started? Where did you go to create one, that type of thing. Just reach out and ask people love answering these questions. Everyone is really friendly in the virtual system world. They are there to help you as much as possible. Hopefully you enjoy creating portfolio, but definitely spend some time, quality time, getting it right and making it easy to update as well would be the only thing I'd say as well. 5. Social Media Marketing: In this lesson, we're going to cover off on social media marketing. Social media marketing is important for your business because it allows you to connect with your target audience in a more personal and authentic way. If you're really not sure about it and why you should be doing it as a virtual assistant, I'm going to give you five reasons why you should. So it does increase your brand awareness. Social media platforms allow businesses to reach a large number of people quickly and easily. By posting regularly and engaging with your followers, you can increase your brand awareness and reach your customers. This is really important for you as well. A majority of people will look at your brand awareness. If you've got a website and you pop your social media icons somewhere on the page, people tend to click through them to see what you're doing on social media, to see you're following, to see what kind of content you're doing. If you are a VA in particular, it is really, really important to try and grow your brand awareness and showcase what you do through your own channels. This is really important if you do want to increase that awareness and especially for people in a specific industry, I think, you want to be coming across as the expert in that industry. This is how you would do it. It's also very cost effective advertising. There are so many different ways of advertising out there that could be really, really expensive. Social media is one that isn't. The reason for this is you can create your own budget. It can reach a larger audience that are already on social media, so the pricing of it is a lot less. Also, you can actually change your ads based on performance, which makes it way more cost effective because if you did, for example, printed ad in a magazine, and you didn't really get much out of it, then you might try a different ad the following month. Whereas this is a little bit different in the fact that you can actively change it whenever you need to to be a more effective ad. It is way more cost effective than any other means. It improves customer engagement. Social media platforms allow businesses to interact their customers directly where you can answer questions and respond to feedback instantly. It's so much easier than, say, for example, emails or phone calls or anything like that. Somebody can catch you on Facebook and that pops up your phone and like, I can reply that. Just now, reply done. That quickness, that easy response better than most people don't actually like to ask questions through emails. They'd rather do it through social. It's a better way of engagement really and social media has been found to be one of the best ways for engagement with audiences overall. It's the best way to do it. Also, social media allows you to have customer insight. What it does, it provides valuable insight to your customer's behaviors and preferences. By analyzing data, you can actually tailor your marketing efforts to better meet customer needs. When I say this, if you put up a post every week, you can then go back into the insights on pretty much any platform has some analytics and you can see how well they've performed. Who's seen it? Change up your tactics. Maybe some of your clients don't tend to see things until first thing in the morning, or they like to go on social media at lunch. Audiences go on at different times depending on the platforms. But you can analyze all of this information to figure out how to target your ideal audience. You can understand the behaviors as well. If you're getting more interaction by a quick post that you randomly did on one evening, you're like, whoa, that got way more engagement or a video that was very engaging. It's got loads of content and it's very educational and that came across as way better than you just putting a little did you know fact out there? The content types can be adapted to suit your audiences, but the analytics can help give you insight into that. Whereas any other marketing effort, it wouldn't. Final reason, it increases your website traffic. Social media platforms can help drive traffic to your business website through links, call to actions, and it can generate meat and increase sales. When you do social media, try and include links, call to actions, make it really, really easy for people to find out more about you. This can actually lead to a really good lead from your website that actually stated social media. This is the whole purpose of social media. It's basically about getting you out there, seen as authentic. I can give you vibe insight into your target audience, and then it can just basically push that traffic to your site and then generate those opportunities. That's the whole point of social media really, and a lot of businesses are utilizing it more and more and more. The one thing I will say with social media is try and make your content not salesy as much as you can. Try and have that balance of educational fun, put some memes out there, some personal stuff out there, make it interesting so people want to find out more about who you are and what you do. Obviously, you can showcase what you are capable of doing, do little videos. But it is trial and error. You will have to figure out what platforms your ideal audiences, what type of content people love seeing, and then you just need to monitor what works and what doesn't, but it can be the most effective way for you to actually reach your customers and get those leads and get that business and work with some amazing people. It's worth looking into creating up those social media platforms. 6. Email marketing: So we're going to cover off about email marketing. Email marketing is the most effective way for businesses in the UK to reach out to those audiences and to promote products or services. It is very effective way to grow your audience. Alongside social media, it is really effective. Over the last few years, people thought, it's going down, but it's actually just risen up now because people really respond well to emails. Most people will sign up to an email, you've probably done it yourself to things they're interested in. So what you'll find as a VA is if you have an expertise in certain industry and you do emails to people, you've got people to sign up to your emails, that can lead to you coming across as an expert to you generating an income and getting those clients from it. That's how effective email marketing can be. First of all, I'm going to go through the steps I'm getting started with it, and then we're going to talk about the importance of email marketing and really, some ideas for you to think about when it comes to, is this going to be a way that I'm going to market to my audience? So the first step is, when it comes to email marketing, is to build your email list. If you haven't got a list, you're not going to be emailing people. That's the main thing. You're going to have to spend some time figuring out how to collect email addresses of people who've shown interest in your business. Here's a few ideas on how. You can try offering a newsletter. You can explain that newsletter will have interesting tips and links and things like that, make it really juicy for people who, yeah, I want to know about that and always stick to being consistent when it comes to those newsletters. You can also say, if you sign up to this, you get a free ebook in a topic that they want to read about, that type of thing, relate to the industry. Or you can do discount codes in exchange for an email address. But these are just a few ways to grow your list. But there are plenty of other ways. If you type in growing your email list or how to obtain them, then there are loads and loads of ideas out there. It might just take some time figuring out what works for you, but you will have to invest some time in creating the eBook or creating the newsletter each week. But I promise you, once you started to build up that email list, it will benefit you long term. Then you've got to decide on the email marketing service. Who are you going to use? There are Mail chunk, which is on the right, you can see a little Piterunky. That's probably the main one. Awe mail or Light is one that I choose personally and it's fantastic and they're all free to start with. You will start have to eventually pay once you've grown your list, but for now they're free, which is great because you're just starting out. But check them out. They're very easy to use. You can use drag and drop in creating your emails. But it's a great way just to store all those email contact details and things like that. Then you've got to think about engaging content. There is no point in creating a newsletter or anything like that. That's just really not interesting. If it's just written out, bullet points or anything like that, I switch off passing as well. You need to make it really inviting, give lots of different options, but keep it relevant to what they've signed up for, if you know what I mean? And if you are an industry person in say, health and beauty, that type of thing, make the content really interesting. Provide links to different sites to your site, to other sites, make it very informative and fun. But always make sure that you're always sending the email out when you should. If you did say, sign up, you get an email every week. Make sure that you've done the email every week. Then you should be thinking about personalizing your emails. When it comes to this, you can address the subscriber. A lot of the tools that you can use, they basically just pop in the name of the person. When someone signed up to your newsletter, they probably put their first and the second name and their email address in and then it comes like, hi, such and such, and then the email continues. It just feels a bit more personalized when it's got your name on it. Also you can segment the list based on their interests. If you had four or five different ways of signing up to newsletters and stuff, but they're all on different topics, then you could have different emails going out to those different interests, if you know what I mean. But that could just add up to a bit more work. But, it's entirely up to you how you want to do it. Emailing is just it can be whatever you want it to be. You can keep it very simple or you can make it so you've got multiple different emails going out if you've got the time to do. The final thing you need to be thinking about is measuring and analyzing your results. Use the analytics provided by your email marketing service to track the open and click through rates. This will help to see if people are actually interested in your content, and then this will help you when you're creating the next one and the next one. A bit like every other social platform, you've got the analytics, it just provides you insight into how effective it is. It's worth looking into each week. So I've mentioned how to set up email marketing. I'm going to tell you the reasons why it's so important for you. First of all, it is a cost effective way to reach a large audience compared to traditional advertising methods. It is very cost effective. A lot of the services you can use are free up to a certain amount of emails that you'll be sending out. So in a way, some of the time, it can be free for you just pop out an email and that can potentially lead to a new lead, which is fantastic. Also, you can segment your audience and send personalize messages to specific groups, which can result in higher engagement rates. I mentioned that you can have different emails, sign ups and things like that depending on the interest. Yeah, this could be very, very effective way in reaching different audiences with different understanding and different interests, if you know what I mean? It can be very effective. You can also track the results in your email campaigns, and you can see where people have clicked. If some people have clicked on, say if you've sent five emails out and they've only clicked on two out of five, it just shows that maybe those two emails were actually more interesting than others. Maybe it's to change a topic, that type of thing that you need to think about. It's also a great way to stay in touch with customers and build up the relationships over time. In some of the emails, you could offer interesting webinars where people can ask you questions if they wanted. You're building up that trust, which is really, really important because once they've got trust in you, then they're more likely to take up services with you. The final important reason is it can increase your sales by promoting your products and your services to your audience. Those emails that you pop out, you can be putting in products or services like a picture with some text or offers or anything that you want to push basically in those emails as well on every single email, you probably want to do it. But it's really effective way to get people to see what you're about and what you have to offer, which can lead to them actually taking up what you have to offer. Majority of the time, people tend to open emails for a few weeks at time, get to understand what you're about, how relevant you are before they actually go, what is it that they actually off? So it's really important. Hopefully, this has provided insight into email marketing as a whole. If you want to find out more, do a bit of a Google search, building up, you might have to do a little bit of training on actual creating the actual emails themselves. Like I said, the services out there actually offer some really good templates, so you just pop in the text. But it's worth looking into if you have Niche down or you're in a specific industry, do want to target. And you do have some insight and experience and understanding and things like that, then emailing is actually a really good way of doing it. It's really effective and it will reach the type of audience that you want to be working with. 7. Paid Ads: Let's look at paid ads. Getting started with paid advertising for your business can just be such a great way to attract new clients and grow your business as your advertisement targets your ideal clients. That is the brilliant thing with paid advertising. You are targeting who you need to be targeting basically, but you do need to think about a few things. I'm just going to go through a few steps to get started and some reasons why it's so important. So to get started, you do need to define who your target audience is. You need to be thinking about the type of client you want to attract, what their needs are, because there is no point in doing a paid advertisement unless you know this answer. Because when you come to advertising online, they will ask these questions, they're not going to throw an advertisement out there and basically hope it sticks to somebody. You need to be defining it, which is how it becomes so successful. Then you actually need to be thinking about the right platform. When you're doing research on who your target audience is, what platform are they on? Think about, are they on Facebook, LinkedIn, Inscram, TikTok? You could even do Google Ads if you want. There are so many different types of paid advertising out there, so you just need to be thinking where they would actually be. You also need to look at saying a budget. Decide how much you're willing to spend on advertising campaign. Start with a small budget first if you want to and gradually increase it. If you're getting more leads, fantastic, then you can invest back into that budget, can't you? You can just remain consistent. For example, on Facebook ads, you could say that I want to do an advertisement for 30 days at two pound a day. You can do long term campaigns if you want to. It's entirely up to you. Then you've got to think about your ad itself. Fantastic. You know how much you're spending, you know how to do it. You know who your audience is. Now you need to think about creating the artwork for it and the messaging around it. You need to use attention grabbing headlines, good quality images, and a very clear quarter action. It's really, really important. On Facebook, you can do different ones. For example, you could do messaging, filling in a form, contacting you directly, going to your website, D's loads them. I have a think what your quarter action wants to be. Then the great thing about paid ads is you can monitor them and adjust them. You need to be keeping an eye on your ad performance, adjusting the campaign as you need to so that you are reaching the right people. You can adjust your budget as well, so you might think, do you know what, I might put another five to 100 quid into this because I have that resource now and I can bump up my efforts. That's something you can do, which is really resourceful. You can even stop a campaign if you've got enough leads or you think it's just not working generally for you. You can stop them if you want to. So I've explained how to set the map. But if you are really considering doing paid ads, but you're still brooding on the fence with it, here are four main reasons you need to think about. First one, it can help you reach a larger audience than organic marketing methods alone. So when I say the word organic, I mean without any money put behind it. It's like when you post on social media or put on email and stuff, there's no money behind it, basically, pushing it forward and promoting it basically. So it's another way to push it to the right people. Number two, it allows you to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests and behaviors. This can reach the right people at the right time, so it will be hitting people who are going to be interested in what you have to offer. A lot of the time that your marketing efforts might not be targeting the right people straight away, or people don't know you exist or don't know what services you have to offer or who you are. This will help. It's also very cost effective, especially if you're starting with small budget and you want to gradually increase it, but you have full control of your own budget. So from day one, you can change that, you can stop it, it's entirely up to you what you want to do, which is great. Then the last one is you can track your results and measure the success. It's fantastic to see how things are doing, which adverts are working, which ones are. A lot of people put two different adverts out and see which one reels people in, gets the clicks, gets people to do something that you want them to do ring you or something like that. It's really, really useful and understanding how to future advertise as well. If you are considering it as a form of marketing, I suggest definitely doing your homework on it. And the ones on social media are pretty straightforward to set up. Google Ads you might need to have a better understanding with you might have to do homework on that one. But generally, it's just worth doing if you are really struggling to find clients, but you do know who target audiences. If you do know how that is, this is actually really useful. You don't need to be spending tons of money. You can do, like I said, a Facebook thing of one pound a day, two pounds a day thing, if you can afford that. But it's worth having a think about. 8. Networking: In this lesson, we're going to cover off networking. Networking is one of the most effective ways to make relationships and by doing it, it creates connections. When they see people or hear someone talking about conversation, they will recommend you. That's the whole point of networking is you might not find connections just instantly in these networking events, but once they get to know you and trust you and stand your about, they can refer them to other people. Same with you. If you um came across something you were like, actually, I can't do that, but someone else like no, can, you more than likely recommend it to somebody you've spoken to or you've bumped into quite a few times or you might have talked to them and link it in or however you made that connection, you would recommend them. That's the whole point in networking. But I find that networking is actually a really interesting and one of the best ways to be a successful VA. Because as a VA, you are going to be trying to create those relationships, establish trust, reputation, it's just a great way to access new clients and maybe industries you've not really thought about before. It's really worth going along to a few and seeing what they're about really. So if you're thinking about going to a networking event, they are really important for your professional growth and success, but I'm just going to go through some really helpful tips on how to get started with networking. Before you even start going to a networking event, you need to define what your networking goals are. Some people go in and go, I want to get some clients out of this. That's not going to be achievable some of the time. You might go in and thinking, actually, what I want to do is I want to make local connections. I want to be talking to other businesses, seeing how they're doing, making those relationships, that's my goal. It's nice going in to a networking event. Having a goal in mind of what you want to achieve out of it. Is it you want to start connecting with specific people or it's local or however you want to do it. But just write down what you want to achieve out of it. Then you need to identify relevant networking events and groups. I spent some time researching networking events, groups in the area. You can do online ones. You could even look on Facebook. There are loads like hidden here and there. There are some big ones that you can join. Most areas you'll find there's at least two or three in the local area. But just see what they're about. Often or not, some of them are free, just to go for the first session so you can get a feel for it. But once you find one, it'd be quite good just to go to a couple of sessions in a row because your first impressions, you're going to be like, this was nerve wracking and you might not have taken in everything that's going on. But if you've got a really good feel for a networking group, then go a few times because it might be worth it. You never know. What I will say as well is when it comes to networking events, it's a good idea if you do it online or in person to engage with other professionals as much as you can. When you're there, don't stick to one person, you might come across another VA and you're like, yeah, I'll stay with you. Go and talk to everyone. See what they're all about. Everyone's lovely in network groups. They're all there for a single purpose of making relationships. They all know what's about. They're all there to be friendly and outgoing and find out about you and they can talk about them. But always be sure to bring business cards with you as well. If you've spoken to a really good business, but they're like, Oh, yeah, I'm not ideal it for you, but I actually know somebody does. By providing the business cards, they might go, I can pass this on to someone else who would benefit from you. So it's always important to bring a bunch of business cards with you, keep them up to date with your contact details. You never know. They might get passed on, or they might be useful for people who say in about a month's time go, actually, I know somebody. I spoke to a VA a month ago. Oh, here's a business card. I'll pass on the details to this person. More than often, most businesses do tend to keep ahold of those business cards just for future reference. Then afterwards, follow up with connections. After attending event, make sure you follow up. So that could be they may have given you a business card, you could go on to the LinkedIn, add them as friends, put them a quick message saying, I met at the event, I'd like to stay connected, that type of thing, or you can send them an email as well if you've got their contact detail. Some business groups will give out some email addresses for the people that attended. So won't. But the people that you spoke to try and write their name down or if they're presenting what their business is about, then maybe connect with their businesses and things like that. But it's just always nice to follow up those connections anyway because it shows that you were interested in what they were talking about. And then obviously, if they connect back with you, then you've got that connection, that little bit of network that's growing. Why is networking so important? Well, three really, really good ideas. It establishes relationships. Networking is all about building relationships. By meaning others, business owners, you can establish a rapport and potentially collaborate with others. You might find that a business, same amounts of time, go, wait, actually, I do need some help with this and they're quite happy to work with you. But you've already built that relationship through the networking events. They wouldn't have known about you until you'd actually attended them because they've met you in person, they know what you're like, they're more than likely going to reach out. Two, it builds your reputation. If you go to local ones by connecting to other professionals, you can build up your reputation and this can lead to clients in business opportunities. For example, if you go to a networking and you're the only VA in the room that specializes in marketing, for example, people are going to take notice of that and people are going to remember you because you are your industry that you're in, who you are, and because you're the only VA in the room. But it's another way of building up your reputation in general anyway. Also, it gives you access to new clients. Networking can help you meet potential clients or partners. So by connecting with other professionals, you may be referred to other people. People will actually talk to you. They think you're very professional. They think you're somebody that people would happily work with. They will pass details onto other people. It's a really good way of just reaching more people without having to go online or do any other marketing efforts. This is a different type of fit. This is actually making more personalized connections. So where do you find these networking events? I've got five places that you need to be looking. First of all, meet up is a really popular platform. People use it for networking events, groups, that type of thing in the local area. But it's just worth looking into because there are so many groups out there in all different locations that you could join and see what they're about. But the people that are going to these are lovely people generally. They're all there for the same purpose. But you can go to groups that are um a specific industries, interests, that type of thing. There's so much on there. It's really worth doing. It's free to join. But yeah, there's lots of opportunities. Eventbrite is actually another one, which I find fascinating. There are so many online. You can do local groups, you can search by anything, you can search by date price. It's easy tool to use, and there's just so many opportunities on there. People are actually putting more and more events on Eventbrite because people go on there looking for these types of things. So yes, you can sign up to the Easy. It's nice and free. You can even add alerts and things like that to popular ones the local, but it's worth looking into. Then you've got LinkedIn, which is another resource. LinkedIn is a professional networking site. There are so many resources, but you can find local events near you by having a quick search on there and seeing what's out there. It is a business platform, so there are so many networking opportunities or groups out there that offer this kind of thing. It's worth looking into. Chamber of Commerce is in many towns and cities. They all have one that hosts networking events, have a little Google. Most of the time you can find these just by searching them on Google or you can actually look on Facebook, a lot of them on that will pop up in your area. They're worth going into. Some of them are paid. Most of them, I think, can be at different times, quite early, which might suit you because you just want to get on with the day or kids or things like that. They do understand businesses need to run. The last one is BNI, which is a business networking international group. This is an interesting one where you go onto their website or you can be invited along to one of the events, but you do have to pay to join them as a membership, but what it is is a group, they all work together to find you leads, but you also find them leads. It's a bit of a collaboration amongst all the businesses that attend. The good thing with this is there's only one role per industry as such, they'll only have one person that's an admin, one person who has a business in electronics, retail business, they only make sure there's always one or something, there'll never be a clash of, I'm in marketing, wait, there's another marketing pain. You'll never find that in the BNI groups. And it is worth just going across one of the meetings to see if it fits in with your business needs. I've been to one. I found them very interesting. The people there are lovely. They're all very supportive. They are there to help your business and you are there to help their business. Have a look through all of these websites I've mentioned. You will find lows and lows in networking groups. Check out Facebook, check out Googling online, your local area, type in networking, wherever you live. Um, and see what crops up. But if you are interested in networking or you've not tried it, don't be nervous. I promise there they're not that bad, but it's worth just seeing what they're about and what you can get from them. They're really good resource to think about. 9. Elevator pitch : So in this last s, we're going to go through elevator pitch. What is an elevator pitch? Good question. What it is, it is basically a brief, persuasive speech that you can use to spark interest in what you and your company does. I should be concise, well crafted and should convey the essential information about your services in a way that is easy to understand and compelling to the listener. Basically, you are basically telling these people what you can do and you do it nice and brief, it's not long winded. It's very down to the point. Here's how I can help your business. That's how you've got to think about it. How I can help your business and then you're basically talking them through basically what you have to offer. So elevator pitch can be a bit scary. I am going to go through steps to creating an elevator pitch for potential clients. When you have those moments or those opportunities, when you're talking to somebody and you think, ah, I can help them. This is where you can use this elevator pitch. The first step is start with a hook. So you want to grab the listener's attention with strong opening statement that highlights the key benefits of your virtual assistant services. For example, do you need to free up your time and reduce your workload? I can help. Or you mean you spend that much time doing your emails and sorting out through your emails. You know, I can help. You're basically coming up with a solution to an issue. You might have heard them go, I spent so much time doing social media. I haven't got time for anything, and this is where you can come in and grab their attention going. You do know if you outsource that to a VA, you could actually spend more time doing other things. By the way, I happen to be a VA. Born. Hook, that's what you want to do. Then once you've got them listening, this is when you start to explain what you do. So you clearly describe your services and the benefits that they offer to potential clients. Keep it really simple, jagon free, don't confuse them, but just keep it nice and simple about what it is that you can do for them. That's what you're going to be doing. Then you need to think about highlighting your unique selling point. So what sets you apart from VAs particular skill set, you've got experience, you know the industry, that type of thing? What makes you stand out? That's what you've got to be thinking about when you're talking to these potential clients. The next thing you need to do is you might find someone who's really interested. This is that moment where you can provide a specific example. If they say, I'm really shrugging with this, well, actually, I worked with this client for two years and I managed this, this and this and this, and I help them do this and this. Providing those specific examples, it helps them think about, wow. If they help me do this, I could be doing that too. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to keep them listening and engaging with what you're talking about. And then you have to finish with a call to action. Encourage the listener to take action, whether it's scheduling cool reason visit my website or you could even hand them a business card if you're in person, or you can just show them on your phone. I've got website if you want to find out more, or how about I give you my number and then you can get in touch whenever you're free. I will really help lead to something for you, an opportunity that you wouldn't have thought of. So I've put together a bit of an elevator pitch for you. This is just a basic one in a way, it's short, it's sweet, it fills in everything that we've discussed, here it is. Hi there. I'm a virtual assistant based in the UK and I help busy professionals, entrepreneurs, manage their workloads more efficiently. That's what I do. With my support, you can free up your time to focus on what matters most to you, whether it's growing your business, spending time with your family, or pursuing your passions. So what sets me apart is my experience in project management and my ability to streamline processes so you can get more done in less time. For example, I recently helped client increase their productivity by 30% by implementing a new task management system. So if you're interested in learning more about how I can support you, let's schedule a call to discuss your needs. See where this takes us. So as you can see, this has taken everything that we've just mentioned and summed it up in a few sentences. That's how you're going to be thinking. You're not going to be reading off this massive speech, but you will be starting out maybe the first half, just peeking interest going, Well, you know I can help you through time. You know there are VAs that can help you. You're trying to get them to talk a bit more and then you can follow up with the rest of the pitch, which is talking about how you can help them, what your experiences, and then leading to a well, if you've got any more questions or you want to learn more, I can help contact me on this number or email me, or I can email you. If you've got business card, I've got one. Do you know what I mean? You want to finish it in a way that there's something proactive. If they're saying, no, do you know what? I have to think about it. Go Great. Well, how about I follow up at the beginning of next week? You know, we can have a talk then if you are interested or I can provide more information if that's what you're concerned about or anything like that. You can lead them in different ways. But that's basically an elevator pitch. It's really simple to think about how you can help them. As a VA, you can pretty much help most people with the skill sets that you have, because that's the whole point of a VA is helping other businesses, taking that ride off them, that is one of the best benefits for them. Spend some time. Um thinking about your own Aleve pitch. Take something from this if you like, the way it's laid out and think about each of the five points I've went through. The next time you have an opportunity, you won't feel like you're stattering. You've got in the back of your mind exactly how you're going to pitch them. 10. Conclusion: So that is the end of our course. What I'm going to do now is just do an overview of each of the sections so that you have an action to do list to come away with, and just to summarize what you've learned. So the importance of marketing, attracts new clients, which is always fabulous. It helps to build up your brands so that you get noticed. Establishes your credibility, which is really important because the more brand awareness, the more credibility you have, the more likely people come to you or when they do see your business, they'll actually, trust that you will deliver what you offer and they will want to work with you. It also increases your chance of working with people reaching out to bigger audiences across the UK, and it also helps to grow your business too. In terms of building a website, when it comes to website building, you need to define its purpose, its goals. What's the point of your website? Do you want people to book online? Do you want people to contact you? Do you want to just show people the services, that type of thing. You just need to think about the purpose of your website. Then you need to choose a domain name, make it catchy, make it rememorable if you can. Some virtual systems tend to use their names. Some people have short business names, it's entirely up to you, but make sure when you do sign up for a domain name that some of the ones you do are actually really cheap, it could be as low as a quid really, to make sure that it's renewed so that if your business does grow, you want to keep that domain name throughout your entire business success, basically. The next thing you need to decide is your website builder or your platform. This is where you decide who's going to build the website? Are you? Are you going to get someone else to do it for you? If you're going to do it, there are platforms out there that are really incredibly easy to create. Try websites like WIX, Weebly, Squarespace. There are just tons out there that you can start with and then eventually grow to a bigger website later down the line. When it comes to designing your website to make sure that you stick with your brand colors, your logo, the messaging, the tone. When someone's going through the website, it's consistent throughout same with images, that type of thing, throughout your website. When somebody's going through it, it should be an easy journey experience for anyone going across your website. The content on your website needs to be easy to read as well. So make sure that the font size is correct, especially make sure that if somebody's going to look on their mobile phone, they can read the text on there. It's worth just playing around to see that that's one of the things that you've actually sort it out properly. And make sure you've optimized it for search engines. This is the back end of a website. If you're building your website yourself, this is the method descriptions. This is the titles of each page. This is how Google is going to go, Yep, this person does this and then they provide your information on Google when someone's searching for a voucher system. Finally, test and launch. When you do it, test your website, get people to look at it, preview it, make sure that it's working functionally, all the links go to the right places. Everything is set up, then launch it, then do another test. Just test it, get people to click on it once it's finally published and alive. Building a portfolio. If you are a test that tends to do things that are quite creative and that type of thing, portfolio is really important. You need to create a professional looking website or a platform that has portfolios. There are some out there like hands is a good one that you can use to show what you can offer, that type of thing. In the portfolio, highlights who you are, what your experiences, your personality, how you want to work, who you've worked with, if you have some experience. With portfolios, it's really important to make sure that it's up to date as well. Once you finish your project or you've been working with a client, just ask a client, do you mind if I use some of your examples put in my portfolio so that I can actually get some more work. Same with asking them for testimonials. The more credibility you have, the more people will come to you as well, and always showcase your results from your projects if you can. Highlight what you did, what you accomplished. All of this is fantastic promotion for yourself really. Social media. Social media is one of the best ways to reach a large number of people. It's nice and quick, it's nice and easy. You could do cost effective ads, which are really great. You could do them quite targeted as well, which is really great because if you know who you're going to target, then you can narrow it down and you'll probably get more leads knowing who you want to target. It also allows for more interaction with customers, the clients. You can comment on certain businesses, that type of thing, and get them thinking about virtual assistant because not everyone thinks about them, to be honest until somebody goes, Well, are you struggling? Do you know there are people out there willing to help your business? Until you get that messaging out to them, they probably don't even know. It's a really good idea to get on those platforms and start talking to people. It also provides better insights as well. If you're using paid ads or you're just posting regularly, you can see what kind of traffic you're getting, you can see what kind of customers you're getting, especially if you're posting on Facebook and Instagram. They have something called meta and you can go in the background and you can see where people are located, their ages sometimes. It gives you more of an insight where your customer base is. Email marketing, I highly recommend you building up an email list. You first step is to collect those email lists. That could be a pop up on your website, freebie, contacts that you've met. Posting on your socials all the time, but try and build up those email addresses because that's where you're going to get more proper connections. Social media is great, but email lists are going to be a lot longer lasting than socials will ever be. Emails is one of the biggest ways to market your business and it's easier as well. If you think you get 100 people on your list and you're going out and, you know, doing a promotion or a course or you're offering something, it's easier because you know those people were interested in what you had to offer when they signed up. They're interested in you for a reason. They've signed up for a reason. It's just great because you can promote so many different things. With email marketing, make sure that you choose an email marketing service that supports your business. A lot of them you'll find Mailchimp or Milt will offer free sign ups and basically over a certain amount, then you start having to pay for it. So make sure that the service provider that you choose will actually grow with your business and isn't going to cost you an arm and a leg too. So have a look at all of them. I'd recommend Mal Light. It's really, really useful. You can set up emails really quickly and landing pages, and if you wanted to do freebies or anything, you can set them up very, very quickly on that and it's so easy to collect those email addresses. With your emails, make sure that the content is relevant, it's engaging, it's interesting, and if you get quite a lot of people, make sure that you can personalize those emails so segment the groups. On Ml I have say five or six groups all depending on their interests. For example, if you get people to sign up and they're interested in certain industries, you could do it that way where they click on the industry that they're in, and then the emails can be more personalized to that industry, which makes it more relevant, which makes it more interesting, and then more likely to take part in your services or courses or whatever you have to offer. Also finally with email marketing, it's really important to measure and analyze your results. Every time you send out an email, then probably give it a week or so, see how many people opened it, see what people are engaging with, and learn from it. Paid ads is got to be one of the best ways to grow your business quicker, but not everyone can afford it. Especially if you're starting out, it might be a bit hard financially, but paid ads is something that you can look into eventually. You can target your audience, which is great. Like I said, you can use this to grow your email list, I can grow your brand awareness, that type of thing. Make sure to choose the right platforms when it comes to this. This is basically thinking about where is my audience? Where are they? Set your budget. With ads, you can set a certain amount that you don't want to go over and it won't, and that's the great thing about it. You basically pay for what you can afford basically. For example, on Facebook, you could do a pound a day if you wanted, which it will build up some awareness of your brand, which is quite a good thing to do. With your ads, make sure they're clear, concise, compelling. You've got a call to action, what you want your audience to do, basically. That's basically the question you ask yourself when you have an ad. Then obviously, monitor that, adjust campaign. If something isn't working, tweak it, change it, change the image, change the text, change the cause of action. They all can impact on the responses and leads that you're getting. Networking is another way to market yourself if you're really positive, really great with people, and you're not afraid of networking because when you're a virtual assistant, it's daunting. Then do networking. Look on meetup. Event bright is fantastic. There's loads of those out there. LinkedIn, Chamber of Commerce, BNI are all really good places to look for those networking groups. But there are so many out there. If you're on Facebook, type in networking events locally and you will see some crop up in your areas, go to them. The more you talk about your brand, the more likely you're going to get business somehow. And finally, elevator pitch. This was one of the ones that we talked about in another lesson. With this, strong opening statements, highlights, keep fits of your virtual assistant service. Describe what your services are. What sets you apart from VAs, why should they choose you? What's your skill set, give them some examples and make it clear. This elevator pitch needs to be very clean, very easy, very concise in what you're offering, and just basically talking up you basically in a very short time. So that is the end. I hope you enjoyed this course. Keep an eye out, there'll be plenty more of these courses cropping up over the next year or so, talking about all parts of being a virtual system.