For many solo entrepreneurs, a virtual assistant is the first person you hire to help grow your business. This usually comes after you’ve realized you need more help, but before you can afford a full-time hire or marketing consultant. Virtual assistants, or VAs, can help with scheduling, phone calls, making reservations and bookings, managing communication and more. Oftentimes, a VA may have other skills like marketing or accounting, too. 

Sometimes delegating marketing tasks to an assistant goes well and your VA will contribute their ideas and drive even more marketing-led growth. Other times, this falls flat. Managing a virtual assistant and setting them up to be successful with marketing tasks is a skill. Today, we’re reviewing some basic management principles, so you can better leverage your virtual assistant to help you with your marketing.

Establish roles and responsibilities  

Virtual assistants help you by completing different types of work, but at the end of the day, as the entrepreneur, you are the manager or boss in this working relationship. Sometimes you need to remember that as the manager in this relationship, you are responsible for making key decisions, like setting marketing strategy or a marketing budget. While this may seem pretty obvious, many entrepreneurs unknowingly or accidentally try to delegate this to their assistant and end up disappointed when their VA executes on something and it’s different from what they imagined.

As with any other job, you need to clearly define what role you want your assistant to have in marketing your business and the specific responsibilities they should take over. Are you looking for them to take over all execution or just some of it? Will they need to have access to all of your marketing tools and accounts? What are they going to be allowed to do on your behalf? 

For example, you may decide that you want your assistant to help with email marketing. So, you would delegate writing and designing emails to your assistant and give them access to your email marketing tool. Since you’re still the manager in this relationship, you might ask them to run the emails by you before they hit send just so you know what emails your business is sending out. As you both get more comfortable with this, you might even skip reviewing emails if you trust your assistant to send them out for you.  

While many virtual assistants have strong skills and experience in specific areas of marketing like email or social media, not every VA has these skills or has an interest in them. Work with your assistant to understand where the overlap is between what you need help with, and what they are comfortable and interested in doing. You may want your virtual assistant to run your social media accounts or answer support emails, but if they have no interest, this can come through! At the same time, keep in mind that you will need them to help you with other tasks and you’ll need to decide how much time you’d like them to spend on marketing versus other tasks. 

Give clear guidance and direction

Once you’ve established roles and responsibilities, you’ll need to clearly articulate the details of every marketing task and project you delegate to your assistant. Clear guidance, instructions and direction will help them better understand what you want and need. If you can, provide examples or templates for your assistant to work with, so that they have an easy reference point. 

When giving guidance or direction, make sure you share any opinions you have or important factors you want your assistant to think about while they’re doing their work. We hear a lot of entrepreneurs say, “I don’t care”, “I don’t have an opinion” or “Use your best judgment” when delegating, and then the same entrepreneurs have a negative reaction later and say, “This isn’t what I wanted”. 

This type of situation can cause tension between you and your assistant. So, if you are delegating and don’t think you have an opinion about how something gets done or what’s included in it, ask yourself if there’s anything you feel strongly about and either need to see or don’t want to see in the end result. Share these with your assistant before they get started, so they’re clear on what to do. 

Even if you spend hours giving guidance and direction, your assistant may need some more clarification. Don’t forget to ask them if they have any questions before they get to work. You want to empower them to do as much as possible on their own before needing your review or approval, and don’t want to waste their time (or yours) on bad directions. 

Set check-in dates and deadlines

Finally, make sure you communicate your priorities and any dates or deadlines to your assistant. Make sure they understand how to prioritize your marketing tasks against their other work, so you both stay on track. 

We like to break up big projects, like competitive research or running customer interviews, into smaller, more manageable chunks, too. That way, you might be able to help your assistant with some of the work, or vice versa. When you break up your work, make sure to set some check-in dates to keep up with incremental progress. Check-in dates are also a great way to make sure you are well aware of any issues or potential delays.

A deadline is the ultimate check-in date. It’s basically the very last date when something could be completed in order for subsequent work to be done, or for something to go out. If you’re giving your assistant deadlines, make sure to build in some buffer time, in case anything comes up. We like to build in 1-2 days or even a week of buffer time when delegating, in order to make sure a project is completed on time. 

Now that you have our top tips, it’s time to implement them! Let us know how delegating marketing tasks to your virtual assistant goes, and if you have any tips to share by emailing us at hello@thecultivatemethod.com.