While tech and automation have synonymously created the field of marketing technology at an accelerating rate, 59% of American consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience, and 82% want more, not less, human interaction in the future, according to PwC.
In spite of the clamoring for more authenticity from the market, marketing automation continues to grow unabated (i.e., it reached $4.06 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow almost 10% in the next seven years). From my perspective, this trend could speak to how some marketers might feel they are in a position of no other alternative, but I believe there is a solution that combines the low cost of tech with human authenticity: virtual assistants.
Virtual assistants, often called VAs, can offer unique benefits for your marketing team at a fraction of the cost of a full-time marketing hire. Finding talented VAs can be challenging, as is true with any hiring decision, but a good VA will provide enormous benefits above and beyond a piece of software.
Why consider hiring a VA?
There are a number of reasons you might find a VA especially helpful in your marketing company.
1. SEO administrative tasks: Evergreen marketing processes are prime for a VA and valuable to your business. Let’s look at the example of administrative SEO tasks. Any SEO consultant will tell you that unlinked brand mentions are a gold mine and not too difficult to secure, but it does involve one thing marketers are short on: time.
Arming your VA with a basic outreach template and process documentation allows for the personalization that comes with a human behind the email while securing your business’s valuable do-follow backlinks from articles that are predisposed to link to you.
2. Lead qualification: Hiring a VA with qualification messaging is a low-cost way to ensure that your sales team efficiently spends their time with vetted sales-qualified leads, thus improving both their ROI and the ROI of your marketing efforts. More importantly, by providing this human interaction via a VA, the early motivated entrepreneurs feel heard and respected with a human response. Remember, they might not have money now, but they could in the future.
3. Data scraping: a VA can help you find more accurate, better-quality data for a fraction of the cost of buying one list. Provide the ideal client parameters and arm your VA with verification tools, and you’ll be presented with a list of verified emails prime for your outbound campaigns. Who said outbound had to be difficult?
Our Singularity Assistants can definitely bring value to your business, whether it’s a startup or a medium-sized company.
Contact us today to learn more about our Singularity Assistants.