Marketing Friday for Virtual Assistants:

Welcome to our penultimate post in our Marketing Friday series, hopefully you have tried many of our previous marketing suggestions. Here are this week’s tips to help you market your Virtual Assistant business:

1. Look at where your leads are coming from by studying your website traffic. Often you can see what search terms people are looking from and where they have linked from on your web statistics. Analyse this once a month to keep your finger on the pulse of who is looking you up. Google Analytics is free and easy to install with great detail.

2. From a former AdGirl: Don’t advertise! It’ll eat your marketing budget faster than you can earn it and the results (whatever the sales person says!) are just not that great for small businesses focusing on personal service. Invest in other methods of attracting customers like networking / word of mouth / referrals; you’ll get better results I promise!

3. If you must advertise (and sometimes there might be a specific industry publication or must read local paper) try and get some free guaranteed editorial to go with it. Get figures of exactly who reads the publication (don’t believe circulation and take “readership” figures with a large pinch of salt especially for free papers). Try www.jicreg.co.uk for independent readership data.

4. Offer a freebie. Maybe a free report, or a free assessment, or a free guide or how to advice. People love freebies, and they build trust and rapport. Plus they can be used as an incentive to sign up for newsletters e.g. sign up for our newsletter and receive a free one page report on how to streamline your business processes.

5. Write an article and post it on the internet. There are literally thousands of article sites out there who will host your article (often for free) along with your contact details. Not only does this place you as being the expert in your field but it also creates more links into your website.