What Is a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant?

A digital marketing virtual assistant, often shortened to digital marketing VA, is a remote professional who handles the day-to-day execution of your marketing tasks so you can focus on strategy, sales, and serving customers. Unlike a generalist VA who books flights and manages inboxes, a digital marketing VA specializes in the platforms, tools, and workflows that drive growth online.

The role has exploded in popularity for a simple reason: most founders, small business owners, and even in-house marketers are drowning in digital marketing tasks that are important but not the highest use of their time. A great VA reclaims those hours.

What a Digital Marketing VA Actually Does

The exact scope depends on your needs, but the most common tasks fall into a few buckets. On social media, a VA can schedule posts, engage with comments, monitor mentions, format graphics in Canva, and pull weekly performance reports. For content, they can format blog drafts, add internal links, source images, optimize meta descriptions, and publish posts in WordPress, Webflow, or Shopify.

On the email side, they handle list segmentation, campaign setup in tools like Klaviyo or Mailchimp, AB test configuration, and basic copy edits. They can also assist with paid media by uploading creative, monitoring spend pacing, flagging anomalies, and generating reports. For search engine optimization, they can perform keyword research, run audits with tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, build outreach lists, and manage backlink tracking spreadsheets.

When You Should Hire a Marketing VA

You probably need a VA when one or more of the following is true. You spend more than ten hours a week on tasks you could explain to someone else in a thirty-minute Loom video. Your social channels go dark for days because you are too busy. Your blog posts sit half-finished in Google Docs. Your email list grows but never gets nurtured. Your ad accounts run on autopilot because no one is checking them daily.

If two or more of those apply, a VA will pay for themselves within the first month, often within the first week.

VA vs. Agency vs. Full-Time Hire

Each option has a sweet spot. A VA is ideal for execution-heavy, repeatable work and typically costs a fraction of a full-time employee. An agency, like the team at AAMAX, is the right call when you need senior strategy, multidisciplinary expertise across social media marketing, SEO, paid media, and analytics, plus an established process and accountability. A full-time hire makes sense when marketing has become so central to the business that you need someone owning it every single day with deep institutional knowledge.

Many growing companies use a hybrid model: an agency or fractional CMO for strategy, a VA for execution, and a full-time marketing manager once growth justifies it.

How to Find the Right VA

Hire for skills first, attitude second, and tools third. Skills like clear written English, basic design sense, and platform fluency are non-negotiable. Attitude, including ownership, communication, and proactive problem solving, is what separates a good VA from a great one. Tools can be taught quickly if the first two are present.

Test candidates with a small paid project, such as scheduling a week of social posts or formatting a blog. How they handle ambiguity, ask questions, and deliver on time tells you everything you need to know.

Set Your VA Up for Success

Most VA relationships fail because the business never invested time in onboarding. Record short Loom videos for every recurring task, build standard operating procedures in Notion or Google Docs, and centralize logins in a password manager like 1Password. Hold a fifteen-minute weekly check-in to review priorities, blockers, and feedback. Within thirty to sixty days, a well-onboarded VA can run most of your marketing operations with minimal supervision.

Tools Every Marketing VA Should Know

Look for fluency in a core stack: Google Workspace, Notion or ClickUp for project management, Canva or basic Figma for design, a scheduler like Buffer or Later, an email platform such as Klaviyo or Mailchimp, Google Analytics 4, and the ad managers for Meta, Google, and LinkedIn. Bonus skills include light HTML, CMS publishing, and basic AI prompting for first drafts and ideation.

Combining a VA with Expert Strategy

A VA is brilliant at execution but is not usually the right person to design your strategy or run advanced campaigns. Pair them with senior strategic guidance for the best of both worlds. We frequently work alongside our clients' VAs at AAMAX, providing strategy, creative direction, and technical heavy lifting while their VA handles the day-to-day rhythm.

Hire AAMAX.CO to Lead Your Marketing

If you are ready for senior strategy, performance marketing, and a partner who can plug into your VA workflow seamlessly, hire AAMAX.CO. We are a full-service digital marketing company offering web development, digital marketing, and SEO services worldwide, and we love helping lean teams punch far above their weight by combining smart strategy with great execution.