As more people begin working remotely, industries worldwide have changed drastically. Entrepreneurship has been greatly impacted by the availability of virtual support, with lead generation virtual assistant services taking center stage. Because many new businesses aren’t fully prepared to hire an in-house sales team right away, lead generation virtual assistants offer a cost-effective alternative.
To best determine if a lead generation virtual assistant is right for your business needs, there are a few things you should first understand about the service and what they do. You’ll also need to understand the different components of lead generation, what industries it works best for, and the benefits of having virtual support for pre-sales duties.
Table of Contents:
- What is a Lead Generation Virtual Assistant?
- Benefits of Hiring a Lead Generation VA
- How much money can a Lead Generation VA help you make?
- Different Types of Lead Generation Virtual Assistants
- What are the AI Implications in Lead Gen Today?
- Conclusion
- FAQs about Lead Generation Virtual Assistants
What is a Lead Generation Virtual Assistant?
A lead generation virtual assistant is someone skilled at getting people interested in your company’s products or services. It’s more than simply grabbing random names and phone numbers from the internet, they need to find people who might genuinely be interested in what your business offers. To best describe the role of a lead generation virtual assistant, let’s take a closer look at some of their critical tasks.
What does a lead generation virtual assistant do?
To start, any successful lead gen VA should know a lot about market research. If your company focuses on marketing services for yoga studios, it’s vital to be very targeted in your research efforts. A lead generation virtual assistant should be capable of taking basic details, like “yoga studio marketing services”, and finding lists of yoga studios in specific locations.
If you need someone to help you get better at building databases of possible leads for marketing efforts, then your virtual lead generation assistant can help with that. Not only can a lead generation virtual assistant research potential leads and reach out to leads on your behalf, but they can also do follow-ups for those leads already contacted.
Although, this takes time. Thankfully though, that is what a virtual assistant does best – allowing you to save time so you can focus your energy on higher-level business duties like attending important meetings, networking with business professionals, or connecting with current and past clients to solicit testimonials and build rapport.
Imagine trying to contact potential leads when there are so many other components to run your business effectively.
Once you’ve decided that hiring a VA for lead gen is the right move for your business, it’s time to identify where to find one and then figure out the best strategies to use.
Benefits of Hiring a Lead Generation VA
If your lead generation strategy is outdated, it could harm your company, not just in potential sales, but it could affect the authority you build in your specific niche or industry. The virtual lead generation assistant takes the helm at the lead cultivation stage, implementing and executing a clearly outlined strategy to engage prospects and inspire conversion. And to do this right, there are two approaches.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
This is an important lead generation work for your virtual assistant. The goal here is to help increase brand visibility organically and establish trust in the brand with your ideal customer or target audience. This will draw customers in naturally with valuable information relating to your company, its services or products, the industry in general, and your target audience’s wants and needs.
Generally, people prefer buying products and services from companies they know or already trust. But it takes more than simply showing up on Google, there needs to be effort put forth to get higher conversion rates.
Digital Marketing Strategies
- Create website copy and blog content.
- Create valuable email newsletters.
Social Media and Lead Nurturing
- Engage regularly on social media to build relationships.
- Nurture potential leads generated from social media.
Events and Networking
- Host engaging events and workshops for a target market.
- Grow a professional network using various techniques.
Sales and Customer Support
- Maintain updated customer database.
- Organize appointments for a sales team.
- Provide excellent and responsive email support.
Research and Follow-up
- Conduct regular competitor research.
- Send follow-up emails and engaging newsletters.
For a better understanding of the right combination of services needed, take a closer look at the most successful online for businesses. For example, email marketing is a top online lead generation tactic for lead generation, with 48% efficiency, showing it’s worth adding this to your lead generation va job description.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing, sometimes known as direct marketing, is all about making direct contact with a target audience. Although this method doesn’t tend to have high conversion rates right off the bat, if done properly it can attract new business by showing that your brand understands your target audience’s pain points and problems and knows how to create unique and thought-provoking solutions.
The good thing about this method, you can be strategic in who you are contacting, and create highly specific outreach materials that have the greatest potential for success in generating more leads. Here’s a step-by-step process you can assign to your virtual assistant to execute:
- Develop your ideal customer profile. This might be someone searching for a specific solution to a problem relating to the services you offer, who lives within your desired service areas or specific areas, or someone who is already following competitors in your industry. Think of what they do, where they hang out online (is it Linkedin or Instagram?), what social groups they belong to, etc.
- Research to identify your top ten competitors. Compile information such as – what platforms they use to generate more leads, the most successful content they produce to attract quality leads, etc.
- Create your budget. To get a lead generation strategy in place using outbound methods, you will need to be prepared to put some money toward ad spend, especially with paid social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This should be separate from your payroll costs for your lead generation assistant. You also want to figure out how many hours your virtual assistant will be doing lead generation.
- Create an easy-to-use email sequence or call script for contacting potential clients and customers. If your goal is to land more sales, create scripts geared toward inspiring clients to schedule a consult to better assess how your services or products will resolve their specific needs.
- Generate reporting sheets and analytic tracking metrics for your VA to manage and submit to you. This helps make it more convenient to assess the progress, or roadblocks, with your current approach. This will allow for regular optimization, where you adjust things accordingly as needed, making changes such as revising your email sequences, refining your sales approach or pitch, updating and maintaining an Excel database, and CRM management.
There is nothing more disheartening than spending loads of money and hours and not seeing an ROI – virtual assistant services will be vital for companies just getting started. You may also discover how crucial contacts organization is, especially with identifying qualified leads or prospects – an adept virtual assistant can keep things tidy, efficient, and relevant to current needs.
How much money can a Lead Generation VA help you make?
I know everyone reading this wants a straightforward answer, but let’s be real here, I can’t provide exact dollar amounts for your business because each venture is so different and operates with many moving parts that create an individual result for the companies.
For example, if your lead generation VA helps you increase brand awareness on social media by getting more subscribers, the sales your business makes ultimately come from the sales team and their ability to move those leads through the pipeline and into loyal customers.
On top of that, many platforms are operating in the lead generation market offering virtual assistant help and their packages can vary significantly in cost. Depending on where your VA lives, their price point, level of experience, and more, these variables contribute to your specific overhead for virtual help. Not to mention, they might need special lead generation tools like cold call automation software or to set up profiles on different job search platforms to advertise positions if that is something you also need support with.
On a smaller scale, I have found success with LinkedIn networking because of the sheer volume of potential clients in this industry – remember, a job description for lead generation assistance should mention how comfortable and confident they are with digital marketing and cold call methods to set up meetings or discovery calls with new prospective customers.
Different Types of Lead Generation Virtual Assistants
Before going all in on the VA recruitment stage for pre-sales business operations, you need to figure out your business needs and match them to a specific job description. Some virtual lead generation assistant tasks and functions can cross into other roles such as those relating to marketing, social media engagement, appointment scheduling, and cold calling.
Lead gen also can use inbound and outbound approaches, and not all virtual assistance options are trained to do both well. This might sound daunting but don’t fret. Let’s dive deeper and compare these two different lead generation assistance service options so you can figure out who is the best option to join your company.
Inbound Lead Gen VAs
They will mostly take over responsibility for creating engaging content such as writing blogs and social media posts, handling your social media management, researching high-value keyword targets using specific SEO tools and best practices, optimizing landing pages to improve conversions, sending targeted email marketing campaigns, building website landing pages with conversion optimization in mind, and analyzing content to come up with a comprehensive content strategy for a wide range of media types, and researching competitors to keep on top of the market changes.
Inbound lead generation VAs need a creative eye, a solid understanding of current trends in their sector of specialization, strong communication skills (including written, verbal, and social skills.), an inherent knowledge of best SEO techniques, how different algorithms work for things such as social media marketing and blog writing for various platforms.
They must understand how different social media monitoring tools are best leveraged to generate organic brand growth with good quality leads. This type of VA will also need access to tools like customer relationship management software (CRM), analytics tracking for website content, keyword generators, email marketing, and automation tools such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, Keap, or Zoho to better execute lead generation campaigns. A solid VA should know all the best programs available.
Inbound lead gen for virtual assistant job opportunities involves providing great inbound services to those seeking remote assistance for lead generation virtual work.
If this resonates with what you offer, it would be wise to ensure your website and social channels have strong SEO in place, you use quality marketing materials like professional quality video production for online content such as YouTube or video marketing on Facebook and Instagram. You are engaging in comments and creating unique and prolific posts for your chosen platforms.
Outbound Lead Gen VAs
These lead generation assistants need skills such as excellent communication – with clients, potential clients, other virtual assistants or teams, and with sales and management departments, they must be personable and great at networking with others. In addition to being adept in online lead generation tactics, a virtual lead generation assistant also needs skills such as setting up appointments and scheduling calls or meetings, expert knowledge of current CRM options such as customer relationship management software, data management with experience such as creating excel databases, and keeping contact data in line with security regulations and company protocols.
It’s advisable to have an online scheduler program that your VA will have access to, a clear and specific plan in place that details which marketing strategies and services they will be focusing their energy and efforts toward such as LinkedIn or social media strategies for different platforms, a script in place that outlines talking points with potential clients such as appointment setting strategies or methods for gathering client or prospect contact data to nurture future sales.
To assess how efficient your outbound tactics and current online lead generation strategy are, analyze things like – how many phone calls or messages it took to land a successful meeting with a potential lead or customer, what methods used worked best for gathering new clients or expanding your sales team, did your company notice more inquiries or visits to your website, have you noticed increased sales with new clients coming through. The results from this data will be pivotal in determining the next best steps – you can make revisions accordingly if one part of the plan doesn’t seem to be working out.
What are the AI Implications in Lead Gen Today?
AI is something to consider for your lead gen work. A VA team trained in AI lead generation skills can bring serious power to the table. One emerging market trend is virtual lead generation assistants getting trained on different ways to integrate AI with common daily duties. It’s pretty amazing when you think of the possibility of exponential brand growth with services and products.
You’re not only going to save hours of your valuable time, reduce operational overhead by saving money on staffing, and have peace of mind that an expert is overseeing such an important and intensive task, but you also get someone on your team who is capable of incorporating things such as AI chatbot generation for real-time client support, creating copywriting strategies with services such as Chat GPT, Bard, or Claude.
Lead generation is vital to keep businesses alive, especially today. Companies simply can’t stay relevant by solely relying on traditional marketing or advertising to find qualified leads – you must get creative, especially when competing in global markets where competition is fierce and consumers and other businesses want more value.
Skilled experts are trained in inbound marketing, SEO practices, email outreach strategies, and CRM management systems to capture high-quality leads and increase conversion rates.
These services can integrate new technology using various lead generation tools and high-value skill sets, including:
- AI programs for generating social media posts, building marketing strategies, and creating high-quality visual presentations and sales pitches
- Social media automation and crafting client engagement outreach with automation for emails
- Appointment setting programs and creating lead nurturing materials such as online forms, newsletters, and scheduling
By leveraging these services, you can increase your lead generation capabilities and drive business growth.
FAQs about Lead Generation Virtual Assistants
What is a lead generation virtual assistant?
A lead generation virtual assistant helps attract new leads or customers to your company’s products or services using a wide range of skills such as networking, marketing, social media, data management and collection, automation, AI-based software, appointment setting, and scheduling, customer service, communication with current and prospective clients and customers, cold calling and creating high-quality materials for outreach. It’s like having a remote sales department or dedicated salesperson at a fraction of the cost.
How much does lead generation make?
Since lead generation for virtual assistant work is focused on pre-sale activities, your ultimate revenue streams depend on the skills and strategies of those who are responsible for selling.
Lead generation’s value can be assessed by measuring factors such as; increased web traffic to a company’s websites, successful appointments landed by potential leads generated, or by a visible increase in leads contacting your business for services or product details. It’s challenging to measure specifically, as results can fluctuate depending on market needs, variables in a company’s growth strategies and successes, as well as how competent and comfortable the sales teams are.
What is AI lead generation?
AI software uses automated methods for things like compiling databases, predicting business and consumer needs using collected data from things like customer relationship management platforms or Excel databases, writing high-value content for things like marketing or onsite content such as blogging, sending engaging and specific newsletters based on consumer pain points or interests that have been collected by automation, creating virtual avatars or assistants for real-time customer service or interaction.
Why is lead generation important in virtual work?
Virtual assistants rely on lead generation virtual work because that is where most jobs for this skill set are needed today. Companies no longer need to meet their sales departments or support staff in person, so they’re looking at lower-overhead staffing options that won’t break their budget or require investing in things like bigger office space to accommodate more workers. It’s almost like having your lead generation virtual assistant be a secret agent for your company because they can work remotely, anywhere in the world.
Your next steps
A lead generation virtual assistant should be part of your time to keep a customer pipeline.
Contact us today and we’ll match you with a Lead Gen VA who knows exactly what your market is and who can generate high-quality leads.
