It’s no secret that Virtual Assistants (widely known as VAs) are an important part of many businesses both online and offline. Virtual assistants are often used for data mining, sales tasks, and customer service. But did you know that virtual assistants can be used for media operations as well? At Aqua Vida we employ a team of seven virtual assistants, most of whom support our media team. Using virtual assistants allows our media team to operate more efficiently and focus on optimization rather than fulfilling redundant processes. The benefits and considerations of using virtual assistants to support a media ops team are numerous. I have identified five key components of our media operations which virtual assistants have helped us streamline and how they have in turn benefited our clients.
1. Campaign uploading
The process of uploading campaigns into various exchanges and ad networks can be time consuming. Oftentimes, we upload a client campaign across two to three different networks for testing. With dozens of clients and media partnerships, the time spent uploading campaigns on a weekly basis often takes up many hours of a media buyer’s week.
At Aqua Vida, we have delegated much of our campaign uploading to our virtual assistants. Doing this has allowed us to spend more time on media operations which provide incremental value to our clients such as creative optimization and content creation. As a result our clients have scaled faster and CPAs have been lower thanks to enhanced focus on higher level tasks.
It is important to document the process of uploading campaigns in a very detailed manner so as not to cause any confusion or misunderstanding on items, this can produce a bottleneck in your virtual assistant’s workflow. Additionally, it’s important to review each campaign upload made by your virtual assistants to ensure that they have set everything up correctly. Mistakes can happen and as the media buyer, it is your responsibility to correct any errors made by your virtual assistant.
2. Reporting
Aggregating spend and performance reports across dozens of client accounts can be incredibly time consuming for any media analyst or account executive. At Aqua Vida, we provide our clients with detailed weekly reports on spend and performance. In order to generate these reports in a timely manner, we leverage our team of virtual assistants to both source and input client campaign data across all of our media partners.
In delegating the data entry component of our performance reports, Aqua Vida’s media team is able to focus on creating insight and creative reports which provide key analysis and takeaways from campaign performance as well as inform clients as to upcoming updates and optimizations which are being planned for their campaign.
3. Bid modifications
Adjusting bids across ad networks can be time consuming. While leaving decisions on when and where to modify bids needs to be at the discretion of a seasoned media buyer, executing changes and double-checking settings for a dozen or more client campaigns can be better executed by an assistant whose primary responsibility is to ensure these settings are applied correctly. Even the best media buyers can make mistakes adjusting bids if they are busy, and adding a virtual team member to your media ops the risk of accidental over/underbidding can be significantly reduced.
4. Feedback moderation
Virtual assistants are excellent comment and feedback moderators. Currently, Aqua Vida leverages our virtual assistant team to moderate client social ads for common questions, provide responses to common inquiries, and provide reports on any negative feedback expressed by customers. This has proven to be an excellent source of incremental revenue and engagement for our clients who see traffic and conversion rate lifts due to the frequent comment moderation our team is able to provide.
By using virtual assistants for comment moderation, we are able to monitor our client’s fan pages on an hourly basis, ensuring that as we scale, feedback is relayed back to them and common questions are answered.
5. Pixel tech
Many virtual assistants often possess entry-level coding skills that can be leveraged for modifying scripts and placing them across web properties. If your small team only has a single developer, pinging them with constant edits to tracking script IDs and event triggers is probably not the best use of their time. We’ve gained increased development efficiency by having one of our virtual assistants make hourly updates to pixel placements based on ticket updates in our task management platform. Again, avoiding mistakes here is key as one missing tag or misplaced character can result in tracking breaking down completely for our clients. Thus, having a dedicated person to watch over our pixels ensures that our accuracy is as close to 100% as possible.
Virtual assistants can be an important asset to any media team. The use of virtual assistants benefits both media teams and clients through improved efficiency and faster turn around on reports and operational tasks. The use case of virtual assistants is truly multi-faceted and we look forward to expanding our use of this type of workforce over time.