As a busy business owner, having the right tools to ensure everything runs smoothly can make life much easier.
When it comes to virtual assistants, it’s no different—the success of their work depends largely on the quality and effectiveness of your process and the tools they have access to.
That’s why it’s essential that any VAs you have working for you have access to the best resources out there.
Identify the tasks that your Virtual Assistant will be handling.
From managing your calendar and answering emails to social media management and conducting research, a virtual assistant can help you with almost anything you need.
Create a list of what you would like to delegate. Start with the things you hate doing the most! 😅
From this list of tasks, you can properly analyse what tools you might need so that your virtual assistant can properly deliver your expected result.
PRO TIP: Always check if your virtual assistant already has access to these tools so you won’t have to subscribe on your own. Your Workforce Online – our team is equipped with a lot of tools to help our clients, so most often than not, they wouldn’t need to have their own subscriptions.
Research which software applications and tools are best suited for those tasks
When it comes to finding the best software applications and tools for specific tasks, the options may seem endless.
Here are a few recommendations from our experience:
Project Management: This depends on the complexity of the tasks and how you create your process. In our case, we highly recommend monday.com because of its overall flexibility and clean look. Another thing with monday.com is it’s quite easy to create your own CRM with it!
We also use Trello – but for a different reason. The calendar view of Trello is great for social media management. Another app that people love – but we’re not exactly a fan of – is Asana. I think it’s because Asana offers a good free plan, so business owners tend to try it out first. But if our clients love Asana – we have ample experience with it to support that.
Email Marketing: The top one being used by small to medium business owners would be Active Campaign – it’s a really powerful app that allows you also build landing pages and provides a great array of conditions for automating your email campaigns. That said, it can be expensive for someone who wants to try it out first and test the waters. If you’re looking for a good one you can try for free, you can always test out Mailchimp or Mailerlite. If you have a Shopify store, we’d recommend you check out Klaviyo, instead.
Calendar & Booking Management: Calendly is a top one for me, so you can easily book into your calendar. Your virtual assistant can always use the links so they can book your meetings without having to worry about overlapping meetings and events on your calendar. If you have a Squarespace website thought, Acuity might be a better option for you, so it syncs better with the aesthetic of your website.
For Creative Tasks: Your Workforce Online is quite mainstream when it comes to creative app. We use Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes all Adobe Apps. Another one we’re quite fond of and would also be more suitable for business owners to use themselves is Canva. Yes, there are a lot of new apps out there that are similar to Canva and might be free – but Canva remains to be our top creative app for small to business owners. They continue to offer new features in the most user-friendly way!
Setting up your Virtual Assistant for success is more than just identifying tasks and the tools used to do them. It’s also important to create a process that empowers your virtual assistants to use the right tools and applications in the right ways and deliver the result you expect. By making sure you have the correct system in place, your virtual assistant will be able to execute every task with excellence.
This is where The Your Workforce Online Difference comes in. Watch the short clip below!
We hope this blog article helps you to have a successful relationship with your VA! And if you haven’t found the perfect VA to work with – you can book a free discovery call here so we can help!