Tips For Advertising Your Virtual Assistant Business on a Budget – part 2

For the first three tips in this series, please see the post from 4th August.

Tip Four – Press Releases
Press releases are useful for generating a buzz about your virtual assistant business. The business editor at your local newspaper will always be on the lookout for a good business story to fill the paper’s business news section.

Of course, the business editor understands the economics of running a paper, and is more inclined to run your story if you buy advertising space, but will still print stories for special events and openings. Think of an angle. Could you offer a competition prize? Could you help a local charity?

The important thing to remember about press releases is that they must be constructed in the form of a news story. Even if you are a sole trader, quotes from you should be written in the third person – Joe Bloggs says: "Your quote here."

When writing a press release, put the important information at the beginning of the copy and supplementary details towards the end.

You should always provide the reporter who gets the task a simple and easy way for him/her to contact you directly. Often the reporter will want to contact you to get details that will enhance their take on your story.

Tip Five – Online Presence
It goes without saying that, as a virtual assistant, you needs a website. But have you really thought about the best way to use it? Some visitors will arrive at your site as result of your telling them about it, or seeing the URL on your business card or marketing material.

What you really want, though, are visitors to arrive at your site because they are actually searching for a virtual assistant. These are not just visitors; they are also prospects. They have actually gone to the trouble of going to a search engine and entering a relevant term into the search bar and are busy looking through the results to find someone with whom they want to work. So, how do you make sure your site is the one they choose?

Well, search engine optimisation (SEO) companies charge a small fortune for ‘optimising’ your site in an attempt to make it appear at the top of search engines results, and, with good reason. The search engines constantly change their indexing criteria to keep out the ‘spammers’. So, the SEO companies have to consistently keep one step ahead. If you do not have the budget to compete with the big players, the best thing you can do is be listed on their websites. Visitors will then see your information and click through to your site.

There are several directories advertising virtual assistants and their services in the UK. The UK Association of Virtual Assistants consistently appears on the first page of Google and can be found at www.ukava.co.uk

Tip Six – Test Everything
Whenever possible, you should test your advertising and marketing efforts. It is natural to want to ‘jump in’ and try various ideas and formats, and that’s admirable. But, try to keep a record of where each enquiry comes from, and which enquiries you convert into paying customers.

With this data to hand, you can then look at what has been cost effective and what has not. For example, if you paid £500 to join a networking group, and attended 50 breakfast meetings, costing £10 each, over the course of a year, and, as a result, you got one new client, that client would have cost you £1000 to source. If you put an advert in the UKAVA Directory for £49.95, from which you gain five new clients, each client has cost you less than £10 to source. In this scenario, you may decide to drop the networking group and advertise in the directory more frequently.

The important point is that you cannot improve on what you do not evaluate the situation. If you do not know what is working for you, and what is not, how can you expect to improve your results in the future?

Sometimes, you may find that the lower-cost advertising and marketing strategies are the ones that bring you the most business.

For a listing in the UKAVA Directory visit: http://www.ukava.co.uk/html/join_the_uk_association_of_vir.html

For an in-depth online course on how to market your virtual assistant business, visit: http://vasuccessgroup.co.uk/virtual-assistant-online-courses/marketing-for-virtual-assistants/