The Top 17 Types of Virtual Assistants Your Business Needs

Outsourcing in the pandemic era increased the global demand for different types of virtual assistants. As businesses continue to fill productivity gaps and labor shortages by outsourcing to virtual assistants, different types of specializations come up.

A virtual assistant (VA) is an independent contractor who works remotely for their clients, performing project-based tasks or going through a daily task list. They can either be a freelancer or work with a virtual assistant company.

While the industry started with data entry assistants and virtual receptionists, new types of VAs are now being contracted by businesses.

The Division of Labor and Virtual Assistants

As discussed in “The Wealth of Nations” by author Adam Smith, the greatest improvements in productivity are attributable to the division of labor. 

By separating tasks and giving workers the chance to specialize in their delegations, they are able to bring about greater productivity for organizations. This is in comparison to those who single-handedly work on an entire multi-step process.

While finding specialists for growing businesses can be a costly move, outsourcing provides business owners the opportunity to find specialized professionals from locations where labor is cheaper than their locale.

Outsourcing to specialized virtual assistants has now become the modern approach to the division of labor, leveraging digital ways of work to tap into the global workforce and achieve both greater productivity and cost savings.

Read along to find out more about the popular types of virtual assistants you can add to your team, and the tasks you can outsource to them.

Why Work With Virtual Assistants?

Lowering costs is always a viable strategy to increase revenue for businesses. While office staff can be expensive to recruit and maintain, virtual assistants offer businesses the option to get the expansion of productivity without feeling the same costs.

The cost savings benefit of virtual assistants mainly comes from the fact that labor is priced differently in other parts of the world. By hiring an offshore virtual assistant, entrepreneurs get to enjoy the benefit of hiring a new team member, without the hiring costs of a local employee.

When they hire from a country like the Philippines, businesses often save up to $60k a year per virtual assistant due to the lower cost of living. When hiring a virtual assistant, businesses can also forgo the office building and equipment.

Working with VAs can become a business’ inexpensive approach to hiring more doers for their team. This is also effective for finding specific specialists for a growing business.

Top 17 Types of Virtual Assistants Your Business Needs

You can hire virtual assistants for unique and specialized skillsets, or hire someone who would wear many hats in your business and take on a lot of responsibility, like a general or executive virtual assistant. They can be project-based designers or full-time specialists.

Here are the top 17 types of virtual assistants you should hire:

1. Project Manager

A virtual project manager is a remote contractor you can hire to work on current projects or get started on a pending project your business needs to start scaling faster.

A project management virtual assistant’s duties usually include team leadership, project planning, project management, liaisons management, and tracking key performance indicators.

At Virtudesk, executive virtual assistants (EVA) are often given the task of managing an ongoing project or starting new teams for their clients. 

As virtual project managers, EVAs can help their clients expand their business by running marketing teams, building sales funnels, hiring and training other VAs, or taking over some of their clients’ daily tasks.

Virtual project managers help their clients find more time to perform revenue-generating and growth-focused duties. Having one in your team can be just what you need if you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the roles you have to take on as a founder.

2. Social Media Manager

Social media management virtual assistants specialize in strategizing their clients’ social media presence. If you know how much revenue social media can generate for businesses in your field, you might want to hire someone who specializes in growing brands through social media.

A social media manager’s tasks typically include scheduling posts, planning content distribution, engaging with your followers, and researching and implementing a strategy across all your social media profiles.

There are a lot of social media channels you can use nowadays to reach your target audience. It can become a time-consuming process to distribute your content in a coordinated manner, and track and improve your brand’s KPIs.

Hiring a social media VA can help you grow a community that supports your brand and helps your business grow.

3. Digital Marketing Specialist

Even before the pandemic struck the whole world, digital marketing has become a robust channel for businesses that want to grow their audience base and their revenue margin.

As the world shifted into the virtual market during the pandemic, digital marketing VAs helped businesses and entrepreneurs execute their marketing strategies digitally.

By helping teams implement their marketing and sales funnels through online channels, digital marketing virtual assistants allowed businesses to thrive in the online marketplace.

A digital marketing VA can help your business maximize profit by helping you find the best places and channels for your ads. They can also help with search engine optimization planning, website design, social media integration, influencer marketing, and virtual partnerships.

You can even have your digital marketing VA work on specific marketing projects to establish your thought leadership, grow brand awareness, increase digital traffic, or generate more marketing qualified leads for your sales team.

Having a digital marketing virtual assistant has a lot of benefits, especially if you know what you want them to do for your business. Before hiring one, make sure you know the projects they will work on, so you can find the VA who has the skills your business needs.

4. Branding Specialist 

If you’re having trouble with growing your brand and reaching your target market, you should look into hiring a branding virtual assistant for your business.

These VAs specialize in helping businesses get found by their consumers by executing data-driven and researched-backed brand strategies.

A branding VA can help you with engagement and visibility campaigns by optimizing your ads, your branding kit, and logo, and your brand’s overall appeal through market research, competitive analysis, and other research and design tasks.

Branding management virtual assistants can also help your business build a long-term strategy to increase your brand’s market share while carefully considering your budget. 

They can do this with search engine optimization techniques, public relations management, and collaborating with your creative team to strengthen your brand’s presentation and positioning in your industry.

5. Online Business Manager

While online business managers (OBM) can also take on the responsibility of a project management VA, online business managers specialize in optimizing processes, workflows, and strategies for the entire company.

The role of an OBM can be largely similar to that of an operations manager who streamlines daily activities and assists in its long-term implementation. Apart from reporting on metrics and KPIs, an OBM can also take on the role of a people manager and manage teams in place of the CEO.

OBMs are highly skilled VAs who help owners run their businesses even when they’re not there. At Virtudesk, EVAs typically evolve into online business managers for their clients. 

As the client’s business grows, so does the EVA’s role, spanning from helping business owners with their day-to-day administrative tasks, to building and running teams to execute large-scale projects.

Whether you’re in eCommerce, real estate, or other industries, an online business management virtual assistant can help you duplicate your productivity and maximize the best growth opportunities for your business.

6. Administrative Virtual Assistant 

While new types of virtual assistants have come about, administrative assistants remain to be a great option for businesses who need support in their day-to-day tasks.

Different types of administrative virtual assistants, or back-office VAs typically work on data administration, virtual office administration, and IT-related tasks. 

They can also become automation specialists, providing support to team members in the best ways to automate processes and resolve related issues.

If you or your team needs someone who is focused on assisting them with file management, document preparation, data management, or IT-related tasks, you should be looking for a talented admin VA with the skills your team needs.

7. Email Marketer

With all the benefits of email marketing to a business, it’s highly recommended that businesses hire people to specialize in their email marketing function.

Email marketing virtual assistants can help you strengthen this aspect of your business without stretching your budget. In return, you can experience up to $44 in ROI for every dollar spent on email marketing.

That’s revenue growth by having someone or a team of VAs personalize and strategize your emails for all the leads in your funnel.

To get started, find an email marketing VA who can help you send effective emails by designing great templates, writing compelling copy, and implementing a data-driven strategy for your leads.

8. Content Writer

In the digital age of business, content is king. While different types of content continue to grow, having content for your business will always be a great strategy to grow your brand and build credibility.

A content writing virtual assistant can help you continuously produce written content for your business. This is usually in the form of native and guest blogs, but you can also have them create ebooks, white papers, case studies, or even newsletters.

Copywriting virtual assistants cover a wider range of tasks including sales and ads text, social media captions, and email marketing copy.

Content writing VAs contribute to your business’s growth by producing written content that ranks your site on search engines, increasing your brand’s discoverability. 

You’ll also find that more people will continue to support and trust your brand as your traffic grows, especially if your content has high utility for your readers.

Consider hiring a content writing VA if you want to experience the benefits of SEO, but do not have the time to write content.

9. Inside Sales Associate / Prospecting Virtual Assistant

Inside sales virtual assistants or prospecting virtual assistants help sales teams meet their goals by working on sales-oriented tasks.

They can work on lead management and generation, or database management, but their most popular task is conducting cold calling on a daily basis.

With an inside sales associate (ISA), you can decrease the number of sales opportunities you miss by having them follow up with leads, and manage the booking of all your appointments.

If you’re also purchasing leads for your business, prospecting VAs can help you maximize that investment and increase its rate and value of the return.

10. Graphic Designer

Graphic design virtual assistants are popular for taking over graphic content production for their clients. You can hire graphic design VAs on a per-project basis, or have one as your in-house graphic designer.

In any industry, graphic design is a task that demands time, expertise, and tool mastery that not everyone has. Graphic design is also needed in almost every aspect of a business, be it with internal communications or in online and physical advertising.

Common tasks for graphic designer VAs include social media content creation, brand kit creation, merchandise design, marketing collateral design, and advertising design. 

If you want to guarantee a high-quality visual representation of your business and brand in all formats and channels, hire a talented graphic designer for your team.

11. Video Editor

Just like graphic design VAs, video editing virtual assistants, or video marketing VAs, are specialists who have put in the time and effort to understand what it takes to create high-quality video content for businesses and their customers.

If you’re looking for someone who can help you constantly produce content for video marketing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Tiktok, a video editing VA is your best bet.

With the help of a video editing VA, you can have a stronger social media presence with your videos. These VAs can also create promotional videos you can share at expos, speaking engagements, company functions, and even digital ads.

12. Customer Service Virtual Assistant

Customer service is another delegation popularly outsourced to virtual assistants. This allows companies to help customers in all stages of their buying process, helping with client retention rates as well.

If your business is growing and more customers are calling for inquiries and help on your product, it’s a wise decision to outsource customer service calls to a virtual assistant. 

You can even provide round-the-clock assistance by leveraging the time difference between you and an offshore virtual assistant call center.

If you want to secure long-term revenue and increase client satisfaction and retention, outsourcing to a customer service VA can be a good strategy for your business.

13. Real Estate Virtual Assistant

Real estate virtual assistants are another popular type of virtual assistant. These professionals help out agents, brokers, and real estate teams achieve and exceed their goals by helping them with administrative, sales, marketing, and other tasks.

Real estate transaction coordination VAs specialize in helping real estate professionals with the long process of preparing the documents for a transaction.

Real estate prospecting VAs helps agents find and convert more leads, while property management virtual assistants assist their clients in areas of their business that need help.

If you’re looking for more time to meet clients, close more deals, find listings, or grow your business in general, you should consider hiring a real estate virtual assistant to free you up from your most tedious tasks.

14. Bookkeeping Virtual Assistant

Another popular back-office type of virtual assistant specialization is bookkeeping. You can find licensed accountants and bookkeepers offering their services as virtual assistants nowadays.

With the global nature of outsourcing, you can have an in-house bookkeeper for your business easily. They can then be in charge of settling your accounts on time, preparing invoices, updating your ledgers, preparing tax reports, managing your business’s finances, and overall helping your business build a healthy credit score.

If your business is in the finance space, you may want to hire a bookkeeping virtual assistant who understands the help you need on your daily tasks and long-term projects.

Apart from the administrative, data entry, review, and analysis tasks you can delegate to bookkeeping virtual assistants, they can also help your business grow with email, social media, or website management tasks.

If you’re looking for a virtual assistant who specializes in helping accountants, financial advisors, and other financial professionals, you should look into hiring a talented bookkeeping VA who has the qualifications you need.

15. Executive Virtual Assistant

Another common virtual assistant hire is an executive virtual assistant. EVAs typically work directly for team leaders, top executives, and business owners, helping them manage their daily tasks and run business operations.

Executive virtual assistants from Virtudesk typically help their clients with administrative tasks, marketing, and inside sales. They can also be in charge of leading teams and executing long-term sales and marketing campaigns. EVAs are perfect when you want to designate an Executive Admin, Director of Operations, or some other team leader position.

As your business grows, you can train your EVA to become your online business manager or a virtual project manager.

16. General Virtual Assistant

If you’re looking for an administrative virtual assistant who can be more flexible in providing support to you, your team, and your customers, you can hire a general virtual assistant.

Virtudesk’s general virtual assistants can take care of all your administrative tasks while also helping you execute marketing campaigns on social media, email, and digital ad spaces.

If you need help with some data entry, calendar management, marketing, and updating your files and CRM constantly, consider hiring a GVA from Virtudesk.

17. Time Block Virtual Assistant

If you only occasionally need the help of a virtual assistant, you can hire time block virtual assistant services from Virtudesk instead. This is a great alternative if you don’t really have the volume of work that requires a full-time or part-time VA.

These virtual assistants specialize in providing admin and marketing assistance for those who need it on a project-based setup. You can get Virtudesk’s time block VA services for 20, 40, 60, or 80-hour time blocks, depending on how much work needs to get done.

Exclusively for Virtudesk clients, hiring time block virtual assistants require no lock-in period and the hour blocks also do not have an expiration.

If you’re looking for help during peak business hours, days, months, or on a specific project outsourcing to a time block virtual assistant can be a great solution for you.

How to Find the Right Virtual Assistant

You can find these different types of virtual assistants you want for your business in many ways. What’s important is to make sure you’ve designed a process that is secure and reliable.

That includes asking for sample work, screening multiple applications, conducting background checks, onboarding, training, and a whole lot of planning.

To cut down the hiring process, however, you can hire virtual assistants from a trusted company like Virtudesk. That way, the vetting process remains secure and reliable, without using up too much of your time.

You’ll also receive the help of an account manager when it comes to having the best division of labor for your business.

If you’d like to hire reliable and professional virtual assistants from Virtudesk, fill out this form and one of our Consultants will get in touch with you.

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