Marketing Friday for Virtual Assistants:

I hope you’ve had a fun and productive week. Here are this week’s 5 tips to help you market your virtual assistant business:

1.Remember it’s 10 times easier and 16 times cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. Concentrate on delighting your existing customers, selling to them more often and in greater quantities.

2.. Make the process of using you as easy as possible for clients. Introduce a standard procedure when signing up new clients. Include all the information you need in one form, create a checklist of what you need to do in order that nothing gets forgotten.

3. Try to automate as much of the payment process as possible by using standing orders or prepayment via Paypal for example (most banks won’t offer merchant banking to a new VA business straight away so credit cards and direct debits are not available).

4. Offer a special seasonal service – e.g. holiday call answering / off site temping / Christmas card mailing.

5. Talk to other VAs and get ideas about what works from them – Times Crème or the National VA Conference is great for this.