Creative marketing strategies to grow your accounting firm

ForBis Accounting is an accounting firm that provides compliance services across accountancy, tax and payroll. With a team of 10, ForBis Accounting pride themselves on providing clients with tailored solutions that help to achieve long term sustainable success.

We speak with Managing Director of ForBis Accounting - Willy Tan - on the benefits of utilising government grants and marketing strategies that have helped to push their business forward.

‍

What do you think of the future of payroll in Singapore? 

A lot of people look at Singapore as a modern city but frankly, Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are very slow with adopting new technologies. Even with government grants available right now such as the Productivity Support Grant (PSG), people still tend to say “oh it’s too expensive”.‍

‍

In your experience do you think it's beneficial for service providers to be listed as vendors under the PSG?

Yes definitely, if you’re not on the list it can be very hard to penetrate the market.

‍

Do you need to go through a lot of steps to be listed as a vendor?

Yes, it takes 3-6 months to be a pre-approved vendor so it’s quite a bit of work. At the end of the day, it’ll definitely help to push your business forward. That’s one thing that most companies should focus on throughout the process.

‍

We noticed that you’ve got a focus on digitalisation of services on the website, has that been beneficial in generating leads?

It’s helped us streamline the type of client that we want. We used to get a lot of enquiries but we didn’t want them because they weren’t willing to restructure their current accounting processes even though it would help them in the long run. With this focus on the website, we see there are less of these sorts of enquiries and more from firms that were willing to change and were open to suggestions of moving to the cloud.‍

‍

What are some creative marketing ideas you’ve utilised to market your services?

We mostly rely on organic marketing to grow our client base. For example, I have a line “Always open to a tea” on my LinkedIn profile and that tends to get me quite a few messages from interested clients. We also go on online forums on Facebook and help people by providing free advice too. That exposes them to our brand name and expertise, prompting them to come to us down the track. We are also currently working with the various universities to promote entrepreneurship. My partners & I are also actively acting as mentors for young entrepreneurs.