Behind the scenes of the first month with a Done With You content client.
Let me take you behind the scenes of my first month providing a “Done With You.” Content creation package.
In this blog, I am going to show you that when you find the right virtual assistant, the process of setting up and working together can be easy. We are here to help. The time you take to find support is totally worth it in the long term.
My new client demonstrates this brilliantly. We initially got chatting through a Facebook group for busy rural women. So we already knew we had lots in common. By the time we hopped on a call. (In true farming style, it was third time lucky, thanks to sheep related distractions.)
Once we did finally get on a call, it was like two old friends talking. Which is always a great sign, when you find like minded souls to work with it doesn’t feel like work, the situation feels like a collaboration of energy.
Her business revolves around running her Croft in the remote and wild coastline of Scotland, which means it’s not without challenges and surprises, courtesy of nature.
What I admire about Sally is that she knew she wanted to put support in place; she has done the groundwork with your online profiles, and it’s working well. And now with plans for expanding her business she knew now was the moment to get support to free up time and energy to make the next steps possible.
Sally is great at the day to day content, which her audience loves because they get to go on the farm with her. Like many business owners, she finds promoting her products and courses harder to do and wanted more structure.
The nature choice to solve this was my Done With You content package, so we can work together collaboratively to tie Sally’s talent for storytelling posts seamlessly with posts to promote products that fit with the seasonal activities on the farm.
I completely understand that when you’re running a business and juggling all the other aspects of life, it can feel like you don’t have time to spend on getting support in place. My whole aim in what I do is to make life easier for my clients, so that includes the onboarding process. I keep it as simple as possible. After a discovery call I send a summary of what we discussed and how I think I can help. When a client decides to go ahead I send 2 emails.
Firstly, the welcome email with two attachments, our working agreement contract and a new client pack. This helps you get to know my working style and asks a few questions to help me get to know the person and the business’s brand voice. As well as a list of software access I will need to complete their chosen tasks.
The second email is an invitation to join a shared Trello board. Which is where the magic happens. It’s our shared space to brainstorm, edit, and work on content. If you’ve never used Tello, don’t worry it’s free to be on a board and give instructions as to how to use it.
And that’s it for onboarding. I’m ready to get to work.
Sally, like many people I work with started out by apologising that her Canva account was in a mess. Let me reassure you, you don’t need to find time to sort things out before you can work with a VA. We won’t just your muddles. Sally actually found that the need to share files with me gave her the reason to priortise a declutter of her Canva. This is a common side effect of a working collaboration, and it’s great because it means before we even start publishing content, you’ve improved the efficiency of your content creation and made your life easier.
Now that all that was done, the real fun started. As requested, I created a promotion plan to follow so that we could tie the product promotion into the farming calendar with timings in mind to highlight products to help other farmers notice them ahead of when they need them.
For example, making sure we post about the lambing journals well ahead of lambing season so that sheep folk see it and get prepared, rather than notice it 2 weeks too late.
I began working with Sally just as she was about to launch her first tallow candles. Now, like I said before, Sally had done well building an engaged audience. So I was able to create a few posts about the candles to make sure we built excitement and increased people’s awareness of the precise details of the sales launch.
Another value we both have is about making one piece of content work as hard as possible, so I used the call to action in the candle posts to encourage people to sign up to The Crofts’ email list. So that they could receive reminders about the release.
This helps in 3 ways.
It grows the email list- future proofing the ability to stay in touch with her audience, should anything go wrong with her social media profiles. (Remember you don’t own your social media, but you do have control of your email software.
It increases the likelihood of making sales by reminding people directly, instead of being at the mercy of algorithms. (The first batch of candles sold out in 9 minutes and it wasn’t a flook, batch 2 sold out in 3 minutes.)
We drove traffic to The Croft website when asking people to sign up for reminders, and that’s good for website health.
In this first month, we also introduced a blog into the website, again to help with SEO and provide Sally with material she could share to answer FAQ’s without having to manually type out repetitive answers.
All in all, a great first month working together. Sally is relieved that I have taken the pressure off her workload, and I am loving seeing the positive response the content is getting.
If reading this has made you curious about what I could help you with, get in touch I’d love to chat with you.