101 Ways To Market Your VA Business

SVA created this guide after literally hundreds of forum posts including questions on marketing virtual assistant practices. These tips combine some of the most effective and established ways of marketing your VA business and also include some more off the wall ideas which may work for you.

Go forth and market!

Caroline

1. Set up an email newsletter sign up box on your website.

2. Send out a monthly newsletter with special info on your services, events which might interest your target market, a “how to” section or other useful info.

3. Use a mailing list provider like www.constantcontact.com to keep your email off the spam blacklist.

4. Use Google Adwords to sponsor keywords relevant to the services you offer clients. The top search terms such as “virtual assistant” will cost the most so try and save money by using niche terms such as “virtual assistant Wolverhampton” or “call answering Bristol” www.google.co.uk/adwords-promoadwords

5. Visit the SVA bookshop and look up the excellent resources there on marketing your VA business. Particularly recommend “Get Clients Now”

6. Print business cards with an explanation of what you do – lots of people aren’t entirely sure what a virtual assistant is!

7. Print loads of business cards – you can never have too many of these, www.mkprinting.co.uk is fantastic value and quality!

8. Hand out 5 business cards a day – I heard a story recently of someone getting an excellent new client because a Big Issue seller passed on his business card.

9. Give your contacts extra copies of your business cards to give out to their contacts.

10. Put your signature with website link on the bottom of all your emails.

11. Network on online forums in your chosen target market - remember that website link on your signature again!

12. Try Ecademy. www.ecademy.com

13. Look out for networking events run by your local council – these range from support networks for young entrepreneurs, women into business groups and tax workshops run by Inland Revenue.

14. Send out 2 letters a week to potential new clients in your target market.

15. And follow them up with phone calls.

16. Try contacting people advertising for part-time or temporary staff.

17. Get in contact with your local temp agency and volunteer a special rate for their clients. Lots of temp agencies won’t send out staff for less than ½ a day and often the work can be done off site (e.g. marketing mail outs), making ideal for VAs.

18. Remember on average it takes 7 communications before someone will buy from you – so try, try, try, try, again, again and then try AGAIN!

19. Join your local Chamber of Commerce.

20. Put a sign up in your local coffee shop / wifi hotspot.

21. Volunteer to help a local community group with their admin.

22. Make sure your SEO is great (for free!) with WebCEO. www.webceo.com

23. Design and build your own website with http://societyofvirtualassistants.webitup.co.uk – all fully customised and updateable by you (plus there’s a discount for SVA members!

24. Update your site regularly with updates so the web crawlers find fresh content which automatically refreshes you in their listings.

25. Build a blog into your site. I was a bit sceptical about these, but generally they “talk” to your customers, let them find out a bit more about you, can act as newsletters, increase SEO by updating your site and driving traffic, and provide a quick and easy way to update your content. Remember don’t use a free blogging tool which is hosted externally – in order for the SEO benefits the blog needs to be hosted on your site.

26. Link into (and from!) complimentary sites (accountants, business services, industry organisations, your clients, business advice etc). Google likes relevant site links. Beware of link farms with non-relevant links, you’ll get penalised if you are listed on these! SVA offers free website listings to approved members – for more details visit www.societyofvirtualassistants.co.uk

27. Register for free with directories like yell.co.uk, Thompsons, SVA etc.

28. Create strategic partnerships with people targeting similar markets to you (e.g. if you are targeting small businesses try and link with an accountant or printer to double your contacts).

29. Visit trade fairs / new business events.

30. Create an "elevator" speech to tell people what you do in a couple of short sentences so you can effectively stick in their minds.

31. Try a couple of paid for networking groups like BNI, Lead Generation etc - most will let you "try before you buy" and you might make some useful contacts.

32. Tell everyone you meet about your business - your first client will probably be amongst your friends and family!

33. Write a press release and call up / contact your local newspaper / magazines - try www.mediauk.com for contacts.

34. Speak at an event, your local college, a new business event etc.

35. Be generous with advice and your speciality - you'll be surprised by how much comes back to you tenfold!

36. Leaflets in local businesses (provide a nice plastic leaflet holder).

37. Make sure that you always have business cards on you - you never know when you are going to need them.

38. Attend networking events online and offline. Make sure that you listen to others and don’t necessarily go straight into what you do. Allow the other person to say what they do and ask them questions and see if there are any ways that you can help.

39. When attending events, have a business card as your name badge, if possible.

40. Ask for referrals for clients.

41. Offer a discount when someone refers a client.

42. Ask clients for any ways that you can change/make your business practices better, alternatively if you have lost a client, be sure to ask why!

43. Find a target market - contact them by mail, and be sure to follow-up.

44. Identify new target markets.

45. Advise clients of new services.

46. Have promotions.

47. Do a marketing session once a month where you sit down, think about your clients and plan how to get them!

48. Brain storm with a business buddy – two heads are better than one, and they may come up with a novel way of attracting new business.

49. Try out any hot desking facilities in your area – many have a “pay as you go” rate and don’t offer VA services. It’s a good way to get out of the house and meet some other businesses.

50. Produce a colourful, tri-fold marketing leaflet, describing your business, to hand out at networking meetings and always keep a few in your handbag or briefcase along with your business cards.

51. When handing a business card/leaflet to someone give it with both hands, as though it were a gift - it is!

52. Volunteer to write a business column or contribute to a local newspaper or magazine.

53. Become a great source of information for your clients - I often have clients phoning me up for really random things but I'm often able to put them in touch with just the right person - so when they hear of someone needing my services, I'm front of their mind!!!

54. Offer a free trial. A lot of people aren’t sure how the service will work; offering them a free trial takes the risk away and may even encourage them to tell their friends about the service.

55. Say thank you. A range of nice presents are available to customise with your logo and also say thank you for their custom.

56. 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.

57. Make the process of using you as easy as possible for clients. Introduce a standard procedure when signing up new clients.

58. 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).

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

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

61. Contact other VAs and ask if they have any subcontract work going or better still team up with a VA who has different skills to you and do a client swap – you refer clients to her in her speciality and she refers clients to you in yours.

62. Brand everything! From CDs, pens, notepads, envelopes, letterhead – make sure your contacts are on it. Firstly it makes it easier for people to find you again if they need more work doing, but secondly it acts as a really good reminder when they take a sip of coffee from your mug!

63. Put in place a follow up procedure on all your marketing activities – put it in the diary. Whether it’s a phone call, an email or a postcard.

64. Make sure you can track what’s getting the best response, get into the habit of asking people where they heard about you and tracking what’s most effective so you can concentrate on that area and get rid of the activities that aren’t making you money.

65. Create an ideal client profile – who are they, what do they do, where do they live and why do they need you? Concentrate on the clients who give you profit. You know the clients who don’t pay on time, mess you about and generally cause chaos? Forget them – if they can’t afford to pay you, you can’t afford to do business with them.

66. Print up some fun postcards. Great for sending out reminders of new products, events or special deals. And they save on envelopes and postage. Remember to keep the message / picture quite generic so you can reuse them and they don’t go out of date. And, as always, put your contact details on them!

67. Printing a one off deal? Instead of colour printing everything consider using coloured paper and printing in black. Good for posters, leaflets etc. in small print runs.

68. Out and about? Try branding your car or laptop. A number of sign makers will do cling labels for your car windows and www.skynmobile.com will do personalised laptop covers. A great talking point on the train.

69. Take up a hobby or an evening class. Okay, this isn’t as weird or as sadly single as it sounds, particularly if you do something business related like web design or accounting… Just think about why they’re doing it!

70. Create standard templates and pictures on www.microsoft.com and www.hp.com to personalise your marketing materials.

71. Make sure you are data protection registered www.ico.gov.uk – don’t be fooled into paying more than £35.

72. Use a rifle instead of a machine gun. Another strange saying, but people are more likely to buy from you if they already know you, so it’s worth re-targeting people who have expressed an interest but haven’t yet bought instead of finding new ones to target.

73. Buy a data list. www.marketingfile.com compiles ready to buy, cleansed lists of all sorts of companies and businesses. Great if you want to target a specific market or area.

74. Royal Mail Leaflet drop – great info on direct mail here including pre-paid responses, buying addresses, and how to keep within the law.

75. SMS bulk text messaging – www.clickatell.com

76. Contact your local newspaper (www.mediauk.com) and ask about inserting leaflets in the paper.

77. Or contact your local newsagent who may be willing to do this on a smaller scale across all newspapers being delivered.

78. Enter a competition – there are lots of new business, entrepreneurial prizes or local business prizes. Not only are the prizes great, but you get to network with other business, and create excellent PR.

79. Have professional photography done. Good for creating a personal “real” feel to your website and also for supplying along with press releases as a visual aid. Plus you can use these as an avatar on all your networking forums. Remember to get hi-res and lo-res versions.

80. Start a networking group. A bit extreme, but if you’re finding it hard to find a suitable business networking venue then there are probably a few other people in the same situation.

81. Offer a prize. Offer your services as a prize in a competition in return for the contact details of everyone entering. Team up with a newspaper, magazine or organisation.

82. Get testimonials. If you’ve done a great job ask your clients if they would mind being included in your marketing materials as a testimonial – get them to give you a quote about why they use your service, how it’s made a difference to them and what it meant to their business along with their name, business, and possibly contact details if they are willing to be a referee for you and your business.

83. When writing copy for your website remember to include those all important keywords and phrases in the titles and first part of the text. Search engines trawl through these and will recognise your site as a “Virtual Assistant”, “Administrative Support” “offering bookkeeping, web design and secretarial support” “based in Edinburgh” site and list it as such. Also keep it short, snappy and use lots of bullets, as people tend to scan sites rather than reading them.

84. Frequent flyers for VAs? Offer a discount on services when they buy over a certain amount – buy 5 hours, get one free for example.

85. Under promise and over deliver customer delight every time. Note: not customer satisfaction, it’s boring and everyone does it!

86. When emailing clients make the email interactive with lots of links, clicks and further information for them to use. Plus if you host the articles they click through to on your site, it’ll help your hit rates and again Google loves that!

87. Create a call to action on all your marketing materials. Think about what you want the person to do when they get your email or pick up your flyer – then tell them to do it! So often you see flyers with lots of info but no real purpose, make sure yours gets results.

88. When writing copy for your flyers sell the benefits your service will give the customer rather than listing the features. So instead of saying “Virtual Assistant Bookkeeping service with 5 hours included” you might write “Sick of bookkeeping? Hand it over to a Virtual Assistant and save time now!”

89. Personalise your material for the target market you are aiming it at. Include first names, specific examples and consider further personalisation with handwritten notes or signatures.

90. Consider buying space in e-newsletters like www.the-grapevine.co.uk or similar. Great exposure to a targeted geographical business market. Or create one to showcase your talents!

91. 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.

92. 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!

93. 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.

94. 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.

95. 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.

96. This one seems like a no-brainer but you would be surprised: ANSWER THE PHONE! Have a reliable answer phone or answering service and check messages and return calls as soon as possible. It’s silly to make all that effort getting people to call you and then not following up. Ditto emails – if you are out of the office put an autoresponder on telling people when you’ll be returning and responding to their email. Use the SVA VA Call Answering Service @ £25/month for 50 free calls.

97. Plan! Make time in your schedule for marketing your business. Sit down and plan when different activities will need to be done in order to bring in business at quiet times over summer holidays or at Christmas. Not only will this help you manage your time properly, it will also help you budget. Aim for about 50% of your time being spent on marketing in the first 6 months.

98. Podcast - use www.audioacrobat.com to create and distribute your podcast. You could use it as an aural newsletter or even as a free product. It’s just one more way of getting in contact with your clients.

99. Spellcheck. I’m so going to shoot myself in the foot and create about 10 bloopers in this text but spelling and grammar are especially important in the VA industry and you should always get someone to read over and check your marketing materials with fresh eyes BEFORE they go to print. (I have hundreds of misspelt business cards festering under the sofa to prove that I have now learnt my lesson). Consider also that your spelling and punctuation will also be under scrutiny on forums and online, so remember check twice, post once.

100. Listen to what your customers are saying. Their feedback will help you create new products and services that they will use and keep them delighted with your service. Consider feedback forms or online “suggestion box” email address.

101. Finally, marketing is the backbone of your small business. It’s an essential ingredient to your success but you should have fun doing it. Make sure what you are doing suits you – good luck!!!

Please note that whilst every effort is made to provide up-to-date and accurate information, SVA is not responsible for the accuracy of the information contained in this Guide or for any consequences resulting from the accuracy of the information. Please seek professional advice where appropriate.