Could you hire a VA to do your marketing for you? It’s a question I’m often asked and in this blog post, I’m going to talk about how you can hire a VA to do your marketing for you and potentially even building your marketing funnels for you.
I want to talk about relinquishing control and gaining trust from people because it’s a lot of responsibility to put on someone’s shoulders and how to hire people to do your marketing for you that I’ve learned the hard way.
Expanding your team
Lots of funnel builders struggle with expanding their team and we’re going to get a bit meta because we’re going to talk about hiring someone to do the marketing for your business so you can do more marketing for other businesses.
But marketing your own business and scaling out the number of leads and sales that you generate is a really important part of running a business.
A lot of funnel builders struggle with hiring the right people or knowing who to hire, or even knowing when to hire.
Handing over too much with not enough information and structure
A classic mistake that a lot of funnel builders make is they handover way too much responsibility and give too many tasks without enough information and structure.
That’s a really common problem I see and people complain. They say, “I’ve hired people to do work for me before it hasn’t worked out.”
Then, they’ll say, “Oh, you can’t hire people who don’t speak English or you can’t hire from abroad.”
That’s absolute bullshit. You can categorically hire from anywhere but the reasons most hires fall down is because the entrepreneur and business owner doesn’t give enough structure and process to their VA.
You think about someone like a brain surgeon who is extremely skilled at what they do. They spend days and even months consulting and asking questions and running tests before they just start having a root around in your head.
It’s not enough for you to go after a VA and say, “Yeah, I want you to go and do my marketing for me.” Then just hand over the role without allowing them to discover more about the business and what you want first.
If you’re looking to define the perfect niche for your marketing funnel business, I’ve got a free list of 49 niches available for you here:
That’ll give you a list of 49 hyper profitable niches I don’t see anyone dominating they could go after.
Could a brand new hire build an entire funnel from scratch? Probably not
The question we’re really starting with is, could a VA build your entire marketing funnel for you from scratch and the answer is probably not.
That’s not to say that they aren’t talented or skilled or creative, but if you want to hire someone to take all of your marketing off your plate, you’re going to have to pay big bucks.
That’s why I say you should be charging 25 grand because it takes a lot of skill and effort to take that entire segment of the business, put it on someone else’s shoulders and get them to run with it.
You have to take the time to train people up on both your business and your unique sales process.
Strategy is thrown around and really strategy just means a plan. But if you want to get a bit more specific about it, it’s finding your position in the marketplace and how you secure that position.
That’s what strategy is. Strategy is how you fit into the marketplace with your competitors and your customers, how you fit there and then how, you’re going to continue fitting there, how do you actually deliver that and how do you do that.
For me, the strategy of where we sit in the marketplace is give away a ton of free information and content and be the most valuable resource for people who want to learn how to sell marketing funnels.
If you don’t have a strategy, regardless of who you’ve hired, they’re not going to be able to take that and scale with it. You need to figure out your position in the marketplace and how you do that.
For example, I know intimately how we generate leads and sales and that means that someone else can come along and improve it or make that process better because they understand where I want our position to be within the marketplace.
The problem with training people up is the big fear is, “What if they leave me?”
Unfortunately, that’s par for the course. Some people will, some people won’t. That’s life and there’s nothing you can do about that.
I have found that it’s actually not the amount of money you pay someone, it’s the management style or the lifestyle that you allow them to lead.
Typically, the rule of thumb is, people join for salaries but they leave because of managers.
I know of two jobs personally, that I’ve left that paid really well and were ludicrously easy and not very taxing, but I left them because I thought the managers and the management structure were atrocious and I didn’t get on with.
These things things take time
You can’t hand over everything and immediately expect someone to be able to run with it.
It takes three to six months before someone feels engrossed into the business.
Something that I learned from scratch was in order to make my VA and my team feel like a part of the business I was having to communicate and still do with them, every single day.
We use stuff like loom and zoom and webinars and all this kind of stuff in order to make them feel like they understood where the business was going, where my head was at.
Hiring someone to take over the marketing part of your business, just so you can generate leads and sales without being willing to take the time and invest a lot of time and money with them means that they’re going to be unhappy and they’re not going to get you the results that you want.
Be really clear with your expectations.
Pay for courses and training.
Allow them to spend company time on training, and you’ll be rewarded by essentially doubling your capabilities because someone else will be trained up to the level where they can perhaps even do stuff that you can’t do.
Divide projects into tasks
On the note, being clear on your expectations, this is where most employers or business owners fall down is that they don’t have a specific and explicit list of tasks and roles that they want that person to do.
If you want someone to take over the marketing, how much of that do you want them to take over?
Is it the small stuff like posting on social media or scheduling posts all the way through to thinking about, or what’s our overall marketing strategy?
On the board behind me is this week’s like strategy and overview and all the tasks that I’m going to be doing.
When I shared that with my team, they felt more connected to the business and to the role.
The more I’ve done that, the more they’ve understood the types of tasks and areas that they can work on and they feel more empowered to take ownership of those outcomes.
But it’s only because I’m explicit and really specific with what those outcomes are that people feel they can take ownership over them.
If you are going to hire someone to do work for you, you need to be really specific about what you want them to do.
What I like to do is do a stop list.
What are the things I want to stop doing, and then I get someone else to take a look at that.
It’s everything from setting up hosting for new customers, getting account details added to Xero, collecting questions and emails and communications from customers, installing themes and plugins, collecting passwords and logins, updating clients on where their projects are, creating pages, posts, sourcing images, writing processes, documenting.
If you don’t define the outcomes before you define the how to do it, you’re going to really struggle with knowing if they’re successful.
If you don’t know if they’re successful, how are they going to know they’re successful?
When people understand what the outcomes are, you’re basically saying to them, “This is how you’ll be successful in this role”.
If they know how they’re going to be successful, they’re going to do a better job of it and take more ownership of it.
Don’t expect too much too fast but expect a lot in return
Don’t expect too much too quickly, but over time, expect a lot in return.
If you’re willing to put the time and effort into getting to know the people you hire and spending time training them, we have this bizarre perception that if we hire someone to do a job, then they’re not going to want to develop with us and that’s just not the case.
In another blog post, I talked about how you care about your business more than anyone and that is true, but your team and anyone that you hire is also going to care about your business.
The more you share , the more open you are, the more specific you are about the instructions, the more trust you hand over to them, the more control you relinquish, you are going to find that they’re going to give you way more in return than you could have possibly expected.
Story about corporate digital marketing hire
I’ve been that person who has been hired.
I’ve been the digital marketing hire. I was the digital marketing lead for a very large data corporation. They had no idea what to do with me. Back then I was essentially fired or made redundant or let go.
It made me feel like “Oh, I don’t really know what I’m doing”. In fact, I was even told by them, “Mike, you don’t really get marketing.”
That’s fine, but subsequently, I have understood that actually wasn’t my fault that I didn’t excel at that role. It was their fault.
They had no idea what they wanted to do with me. There was no defined job role. There was no defined job spec. I remember asking for one and they said we’ll figure it out as we go along.
It wasn’t because I was bad at my job. It wasn’t because people didn’t like me. At least I presume that to be the case.
You, as the employer, need to know what you want to get out of someone that you hired but that doesn’t mean by the way that you need to know everything.
If you’re hiring someone to do the marketing for you, that doesn’t mean you need to be the world’s best marketer.
Just like I hire people to do my admin and bookkeeping and reporting for me, it doesn’t mean I know everything about admin and bookkeeping, but I do know what I expect the outcomes to be from hiring that person.
If I hire this person to do this job, what do I expect the results to be?
Not enough people focus on understanding what the outcomes are, combining it with a specific task list before they hire someone.
Remember, if you’re looking to define a niche for your marketing funnel business, you can get it here:
