Episode 10 Transcript

Heather:

All right, so there I was staring into my webcam. I had my Blue Yeti microphone, my little USB microphone just out of range so you couldn't see it. And my little Zoom app was saying, you are running out of space because I unfortunately have, I'm one of those workers, you guys, where I have lots of tabs on in my browser and a lot going on. So my computer needs a bit of an upgrade, I must say. So I'm sitting there and I was having a chat with a client over Zoom. We're just, you know, checking in. And he was really, really frustrated with one of their VAs, you know, virtual assistants. He said, you know, she's not fixing the website or our website the way that I want her to. It just is not looking good. I'm not getting good written content either. Everything I have to check. There's just so many mistakes being made all over the place. The quality is just simply not being looked after or checked. I'm not getting any advice. I'm not getting any recommendations on what I should be doing next. He was really frustrated. So I said, what is your VA trained to do? Is she a website developer because you're having her work on your website? Is she a website designer? Because it seems like you're wanting her to do graphics. Is she a copywriter because you just said that she is not doing a great job writing content for you? Is she a strategist because you were frustrated that she's not making recommendations in your online presence? Perhaps this is because what this person was asking for is at least two to three jobs, not one, not one virtual assistant. Now, look, if you can find somebody that does all of those things, you have yourself a unicorn, like seriously something very, very rare. And if you're listening to this and you're like, Oh, Heather, I could do all that. I could do copywriting, web design. I actually get my hands dirty in the code on the website. Uh, I know, you know what, how to read numbers. I know how to do strategy, all those things. Then you are a unicorn, just so you know, good on you because that is very, very rare. So when I asked him these questions, it's almost He was expecting inexpensive labor to be everything instead of understanding the individual role of his VA and then developing systems for her and playing to her strengths. Does that make sense? So he didn't understand that he had multiple roles that needed to be filled and he didn't actually know what his virtual assistant was even trained to do. Like what was Guys, I often get asked all the time, who do I need on my team when it comes to my online presence? Sometimes budget is an issue and that's why I get asked this question, right? Because people are just trying to work out, like how do I get inexpensive labor if possible to fulfill that role? Or it could also be because some of our clients, companies are growing really, really, really fast and they don't wanna make mistakes with bringing on team members to help them in the space of their online marketing or digital presence. So it got me thinking, there's another story. Another client came to me and just said the other day, you know, look, I really want to hire in-house, but I don't know what I don't know. Like what roles do I need? And can you train them for me? So I know this is a pain point, right? Because this guy, he's like, I don't, like budget's not too much of an issue. I want a good healthy team, but I actually just don't know. Like I just know that I need digital marketing, but I don't even know where to start, help. And can you find the person and can you train them? That got me thinking on something else. So I'm going to probably talk through this podcast later because that is something I'm working on to help business owners. And then another person approached me the other day as well. And this person is like, I can see my team posting stuff on social media. I know they're doing stuff, but they're, and they even tell me they're spending like three hours a day on engagement. So going off, like say on LinkedIn and commenting on other people's posts and liking them and all that sort of stuff, right, on social media. but there is absolutely no business coming in. So they had a team member that was doing a whole bunch of work, but there was no results directly tied to what they were working on. Frustrating, right? Can you guys relate to any of this? If you're growing, if you're growing a business, certainly I'm sure you do in some way, shape or form. And if you have had a virtual assistant or you have one or a few right now, you might also be really feeling the pain and going, yeah, that's me, like I get that. So question is, do you need on your team? I'm guessing I have listeners at varying levels of business growth. So I'll answer the most important roles, but there's gonna be nuances in each of these roles and I can't talk directly to your business and what is going on with you, but I'll give you the basic overview of ultimately what you need to be successful in your online marketing and your growth in the digital space. So number one, you do need a strategist, absolutely. This is the person that decides on your marketing calendar, the campaigns you're going to run, campaigns meaning ads or EDMs or emails to your database or landing pages on your website to help support your marketing activities. They need to understand the numbers. They need to literally have a dashboard or look in to the metrics and go, oh, look, we are traffic tanked last month. What happened? What do we need to do to fix it? You do need a strategist. And a strategist is a very specific role. A lot of... business owners will actually upskill themselves in this role. So they understand what they're doing. Like a lot of the businesses I consult for. So I consult, I do like Zoom calls and coaching and consulting, but I also go off site from me. I go, or I should say on site to the client's teams. And I'll actually train teams of people as well, because there will be somebody on the team that wants to take on this role of strategists. And they have no idea like what they should be looking at or where to get started. But this is like the person that drives everything in the digital presence or the online marketing space, right? They drive, they come up with the ideas and then they drive the team with them on what to do next. So you, A, you got your strategist B designer. So you do need somebody that is going to design your different materials. So they look the same and they have a consistent brand across all of them. So this would be somebody that could be, you know, designing posts for social media. This would be somebody that would be designing images for your website or your website. This would be, you know, for brochures or signs or any of that sort of stuff. So you have that consistent look and feel. Designers can work in tools like Canva these days, and there's going to be a lot of assistants or virtual assistants or outsourced people that you can go to that have, you know, really specialized in design. And I want to make that distinction though, that design is very different from developing a website or building pages on a website. A lot of people think it's one and the same. Even with Google search results, people will be Googling website designer way more than website developer because that's how they think, like I need a website designed. Very, very different. Most designers work on things to make them pretty. Some are trained in UI or UX, so they actually understand how to get results from a website if they're doing the website stuff, but it's not always 100% the case. So you do need a designer or somebody that's creative and understands how to put together visual materials in your business. Leaning onto that developer role, right? So the developer is the person that is gonna be doing all of the deeper level stuff on your website. They're gonna be doing like, so let's say you have WordPress, which is what we build in my company, website love. So you would need somebody that does backups, that does maintenance to update your plugins. All sorts of things like that to keep it going, but also a developer who keeps your website fast, where designer wouldn't know how to do that. They wouldn't know about something called caching on the server level or, Oh no, my website got hacked. What do I do? A designer wouldn't know that. And again, if you found somebody that does design and development, it's extraordinarily rare, especially if they're trained in the space of conversion rate optimization, which is basically monitoring your site to make sure that it is getting the best results for your business. So normally a developer is a different role than a designer. And like when we work on projects with clients, oftentimes, well, not oftentimes, it depends. Like we have an in-house designer and a developer, and they can work side by side. But we also sometimes get people that come to us and they're like, can you do the designs? And then we have a developer and can you then give them over in a way, you know, when you know converts and hand it to the developer and they'll code it out. So different roles are you maybe starting to think or, or I guess make that distinction. Next, we move on to copy content writing. Again, quite a different type of person. So yes, there are people out there nowadays that can go chat, GPT jump on these AI tools and just go, write me a five, you know, 1500 word article. Um, but they're not a hundred, a hundred percent great. They tend to have mistakes in them and they all like, yeah, you can play around with the brand voice and tell it to write more friendly or, or any, you know, things like that, but you're still, you can use these tools, but you still have that role of somebody that understands the brand voice that can talk about case studies that can bring in very important elements throughout all of your content to tie together what you're trying to say in your marketing. So that writer slur slash editor role, um, could be trained in using AI, but also would have an eye for editing it and making sure it actually works well. And then you have sub writers off of that. You have other roles that are like, you know, writers training SEO or search engine optimization, for example. So there's specializations within writers and copy. There's direct response copywriting, which gets action taken on pages. There's blog article, you know, writing as well. You have that. So we have the strategist, we have designer, we have copywriter, we have developer. You also need somebody that's going to hold the ship together. So that tends to be in the form of a project manager or some sort of coordinator. Uh, now a lot of virtual assistants can easily do this role. So if you get them trained up on project management tools like Asana or Trello, or whatever you use, uh, in your business, oftentimes they can be trained to sort of hold the ship together and make sure that, you know, things are actually moving forward. So that is very distinct sort of role as well. Like we have an amazing project manager on our team and she's so good with details and date deadlines and just. understanding what's falling through the cracks. It's kind of a very special way of thinking. So you have that role too. And by the way, it wouldn't be a designer would not do this because that's creative person versus like somebody that's strict with the details. Then from there, we have the customer service slash engagement person on your team. This is to be the person that's getting the live chats coming through from the website. If you have that or looking at your contact forms coming through or people DMing you on Instagram. It's that person that's monitoring all the activity that's going on and basically making sure it goes to the right spot. So that's big picture. The roles that I sort of think of when I'm talking to somebody and we're planning out a digital strategy for them, it's like, do you have these parts? You might also need a video editor. Again, depends on your business, right? There might be other things in your hair. You might have somebody that just specializes in your CRM system or your database tool. And that's something else. But you can see now looking through a list like this, very different skill sets, very different training, very different tools. If you have a virtual assistant and you're trying to go, can you just do everything? And can you give me a strategy? And can you read the numbers? It's gonna be highly frustrating for you and them. So think about, you know, good strategy, someone reading the numbers, very, very important. Somebody holding the team accountable, making sure everything's running and following their own agendas. around following their own agendas, right? So each person will have sort of their own roles or agendas and just making sure that things are being delivered on time and really clear. And that's why you have these different roles. Hopefully this makes sense to you guys. I just wanted to answer the question for you because I get it so many times. I literally in the last, like I said, three different clients spoke to me about this in the last couple of weeks. I'm like, I should talk about that on the podcast because it's the thing, whether you are trying to scale you don't know. who to hire next, or you are, you know, you have a couple of maybe offshore or outsourced team members and you don't realize up until now that maybe you're trying to make them do too many things. And that's why you're frustrated is because they can't do everything really, really well. So wherever you are in the situation, or maybe you found yourself a unicorn, congratulations. If you do need help, you know, with your digital team. and you're a little bit confused and you're like, Oh, Heather, I heard you say, you just, you know, did some off, like some training to teams and upskilling. That's what I do. And massively, when I teach the university of Sydney's center for continuing education, that's what I'm doing there. So corporate teams or businesses are sending team members in to get upskilled on very specific skill sets in digital marketing. So I love doing this stuff. So if you need help, please feel free to reach out. HustleRebellion.com is where the episodes and videos and everything live, but also there is a contact link on there and you can just reach out and say, Hey, I heard you on the podcast and I am really struggling with my team. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning in as always been a pleasure and have a really beautiful rest of your evening, day, morning, wherever you are listening to this episode. And by the way, I'm really excited to say. We're in 10 countries, that's really cool. So wherever you are listening to us, thank you. Thank you so very much. And I'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye guys.