Do you have less time to market your brand (or yourself) than you would like? A lot of your time is taken with managing the business, fighting fires or simply keeping on top of the day to day running of your business or brand. So how or when can you be expected to find the time to market properly?

Why and how should you outsource?

Most businesses cannot afford a “Marketing Team”, so outsourcing provides the perfect way to get just what you need in each area of marketing and not a drop too much. This saves you money which you are better off using on your marketing spend.

If you are looking for an alternative to the all-encompassing fees of a marketing agency which expects you to work on minimum budgets and minimum spends, a skilled virtual assistant agency can be the perfect answer to put together a strategy and help you implement it just as much as you want, and through the channels that you desire, and can afford at the time of asking. This allows the option to scale up in line with your revenues and without committing too heavily.

So what Marketing can you actually outsource?

Of course, there is no limit given the time and the funds, but in this case I want to look at a few key elements that you can outsource to lighten your load and help you carry your brand forward.

Below are some of the principal stepping stones in defining and implementing a Marketing Strategy, all of which can be outsourced to skilled marketing virtual assistants.

OUtsourcing your Marketing Strategy

A strategy is the key starting point for any marketing. You may already have in mind how you want to do things, but you do need to spend a little time on researching and assessing your competitors, defining your audience, researching potential new demographics and seeing where your target audience meets, talks and engages on the Internet and generally what floats their collective boats.

In this way you can build a targeted strategy which generates sales - not noise. No matter what anyone says, you don’t have to be on Instagram if your audience is not.

What social media tasks can you outsource?

A Social media strategy is very important to make sure you are present where your audience is, that you engage with them, serve up interesting material and essentially take part in a conversation with your potential customers.

This means planning content (based on a strategy), creating content, scheduling it and being consistent. You hear a lot these days about “the algorithm” and like it or lump it, it is here to stay, so random, occasional or off message posts on your social channels and your brand is heading in the wrong direction. On the other hand if you prepare, schedule and post regularly relevant, well-formatted content that your target audience is interested in, then you will see your following grow, your engagement grow and ultimately also your sales.

Of course a well-curated social media presence takes time in the early stages, so outsourcing to skilled social media virtual assistants in order to market yourself better on the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is a sure-fire way of growing your business.

Which Content creation tasks can you outsource?

You hear a lot about content marketing these days and, although the word “content” is a little derogatory in as far as it seems to strip out the hard work and craft from the articles, posts or videos you produce, it is a crucial area for any brand or business looking to make itself heard above the white noise of the internet.

Quality content trumps everything of course, so making sure you are producing interesting and useful articles, infographics or videos for your target audience, and then tailoring them for the various channels you have, whether that be IGTV on Instagram, or a long and interesting Facebook text post, is of paramount importance in marketing yourself better.

There is also the grunt work of content creation which can mean transcribing video to text, adding show-notes to podcasts and videos and other time-consuming tasks that take you away from doing what you do best, so why not outsource these to a skilled virtual assistant and up your productivity?

Which Graphic Design Tasks can I outsource?

You may run a website or social media channels, or a podcast, or write a blog, or send a newsletter, or perhaps you do all of the above in trying to push your brand out there in front of the audience that you defined in your marketing strategy.

Once you have defined your audience in your marketing strategy, you need to ensure you capitalise properly and this can mean running a website or social media channels ,or a podcast ,or writing a blog or sending regular newsletters, or tailoring a whole bunch of Facebook ads for different demographics… or perhaps it means all of the above.

Whichever it is, a graphic design virtual assistant can help you create attractive graphics in line with your branding, as well as formatting them to ensure they display correctly across all platforms.

Which web design, content management tasks can you outsource?

Maintaining your online presence is crucial to the acquisition of new customers. This could be ensuring you have a raft of relevant landing pages for your Google Ads, implementing contact forms for customers, maintaining your plugins or managing and updating your blog with fresh keyword-rich content and informative posts to fuel your social media and email marketing.

A skilled Web Design Assistant can help you with setting up or managing your site, whether it is WordPress, Squarespace or some other custom solution.

Need help with your Marketing? Hire a Marketing Virtual Assistant.

We want you to understand the benefits of using a skilled virtual assistant and outsourcing tasks to ensure you can concentrate on growing your business by doing what you do best.

Author: Thomas Smallwood is an outsourcing specialist. Having worked in companies around Europe, from the support desk to the boardroom, he founded bizee.co to help small businesses grow through efficient delegation to skilled virtual assistants. He is an award-winning blogger and a passionate advocate for mental health awareness.

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.