How to better leverage your VA for Q4 marketing

Now enrolling new done-for-you clients

It’s the season for marketing team trauma. Ask me how I know. 🙃

As the holiday season approaches, I notice how urgency increases for entrepreneurs. We tend to put more pressure on our team to execute and our internal environment spills out on them.

Mentally people are winding down while the entrepreneurs are ramping up. I remember dreading this time of year working with 7-figure companies, because the CEO woke up and realized the marketing team had been underperforming the whole year and suddenly, I had to come in and fix it with a Black Friday sale. BFFR.

Here’s the biggest bottleneck keeping the environment chaotic: the non-marketer CEO running the marketing with a generalist VA.

I’ve seen this play out too many times: the CEO doesn’t completely hand-off the marketing function, because they are underwhelmed by the generalist VA that hasn’t been able to figure out how to read their mind, nail the brand voice, design Canva graphics, write converting emails, set up funnels, and develop an integrated marketing strategy that drives sales.

Have you struggled to leverage your VA due to lack of trust that they will get it right and little to no results when you delegate?

Then you say eff it and decide to go back to handling marketing because it’s easier if you just do it all. Only to get beat down by the algorithm and want to throw your whole business away?

Again, ask me how I know.

It’s not actually easier if you do it yourself, it’s just harder to delegate effectively, so you pick the lesser of two evils.

Now that I manage my own team and have removed myself from the day-to-day marketing execution in my businesses, I had a very important realization:

Your team’s competence is a direct reflection of your competence as a leader.

If the team is underperforming, it is my responsibility to coach them through it, not resent them for the half-assed direction and resourcing I gave them in the first place.

30 days before Thanksgiving is not the time to ask your VA, who is not a marketing strategist by any means, to come up with a revenue-goal-saving Black Friday plan. 

Does your VA hate to see you coming? 

Probably, if they’re doing multiple specialized jobs in a junior role with little documentation or direction from you.

Take this 10-question assessment to see how strong your marketing systems are. (No opt-in required.)

Stop having to handhold your marketing team, by playing to their strengths.

In order to better leverage your VA and not resent paying another invoice, you should consider a marketing strategist. This allows them to handle the administrative side of marketing like podcast management, content scheduling, funnel setup, social media engagement, metrics tracking and reporting etc. 

Then, you can work with my agency Villa to handle the more specialized and strategic parts of marketing like campaign planning, messaging, copywriting, and design. 

Your VA should be doing, while your strategist is marketing.

Marketing isn’t a thing you do, it’s a system you implement. Oh and it’s not content. More content doesn’t mean better marketing.

Here’s an example:

Marketing as a thing you do:

Creating endless amounts of organic content or trendy content to stay “top of mind.”

Marketing as a strategic system:

Having a content day to generate assets for various phases of the customer journey - each with a strategic purpose and clear call to action that aligns with the phase the target segment is in.

You can have a specialized marketing partner - for a comparable rate to your VA.

P.S. If you onboard by October 31, you’ll have enough time for your marketing manager to develop a Black Friday strategy and execute everything from graphics, to sales funnels, to video assets for you. Learn more here.