Spending your marketing budget well is better than having an overly large budget, says OtterHalf’s Cassandra Ong
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong to the author.
It is easy to assume that bigger marketing budgets automatically lead to better returns. But as many businesses tighten their belts, a different reality is emerging: effective marketing is less about how much you spend, and more about how well you understand your audience.
Across industries, the strongest campaigns today are not defined by scale alone. They are defined by relevance, empathy, and strategic clarity. Brands that succeed are those that identify real customer pain points and design solutions that feel genuinely useful, regardless of budget size.
Grab and Shopee are often cited as examples of marketing dominance, but their success did not come simply from spending more than everyone else. Instead, their campaigns are carefully designed engagement strategies that deliver clear value to users. Importantly, many of these principles are replicable by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), even with limited resources.
Building emotional connection drives loyalty
Between 2019 and 2024, the concert scene in Singapore witnessed a surge in popularity post-pandemic, where we saw a rise from 3,040 to 7,152 ticketed performances per year. With them, however, came a familiar problem: congested public transport after large-scale concerts.
Grab identified this friction point and responded by offering free post-concert shuttle services following Coldplay’s six sold-out shows in Jan 2025. The initiative did not directly sell rides, but it addressed a real audience pain point at exactly the right moment. The result was a strong goodwill gesture that reinforced positive brand association and long-term loyalty.
The same audience-first thinking can be applied at a much smaller scale. In the lead-up to Mother’s Day, we worked with a local mattress brand that tapped into a shared emotional insight: many people wanted to show appreciation to their mothers, but struggled to find something meaningful.
Instead of pushing discounts, the campaign invited participants to share the last time their mother lost sleep worrying about them, with a mattress as the prize. The prompt resonated with a typically reserved local audience, generating high engagement and the brand’s strongest Instagram performance to date.
These examples illustrate a simple truth: people remember how brands make them feel. Creating moments of emotional resonance often delivers greater impact than transactional messaging.
Listen to what the data tells you—and optimise, optimise, optimise
Creativity alone is not enough. Effective marketing depends on data to inform smarter decisions, especially when budgets are tight. Tools such as behavioural analytics and performance tracking allow businesses to test, learn, and optimise in real time.
Grab’s introduction of upfront fixed pricing is a strong example. Data revealed that users were frustrated by uncertainty at the end of rides. By removing this friction, Grab increased customer satisfaction and improved spending confidence—a product decision driven directly by behavioural insight.
Similarly, SMEs can leverage analytics to optimise campaigns and customer messaging. In one case, a financial services platform reviewed ad performance across the funnel, paused underperforming creatives, and refined its messaging. The outcome was a significant improvement in click-through rates and a meaningful reduction in customer acquisition costs.
This reinforces a fundamental truth: data-driven actions will help you spend smarter.
Partnerships: Doubling exposure without doubling costs
Beyond internal strategies, one of the most powerful levers small businesses can use is strategic partnerships. Collaborating with brands that share a similar audience enables businesses to reach new communities without the expense of large-scale campaigns.
Partnerships can take many forms—co-branded promotions, joint events, shared content, or integrated product experiences. Shopee’s collaboration with YouTube to launch YouTube Shopping demonstrates this well. Without relying on traditional ad spend, the partnership created value for creators, viewers, and sellers, while extending Shopee’s reach across Southeast Asia.
On a smaller scale, well-matched partnerships can deliver substantial value. When brands align on audience, values, and messaging, shared campaigns often generate exposure and cost savings that would be difficult to achieve independently.
In conclusion, big results do not require big budgets
It is common for SMEs to assume that meaningful marketing success is reserved for brands with deep pockets. While companies like Grab and Shopee do operate at scale, their strongest results have consistently come from understanding customer behaviour, not from outspending competitors.
When businesses focus on audience insight, emotional relevance, strategic clarity, and continuous optimisation, they improve not just ROI, but long-term brand preference. The most effective marketing does not come from having the biggest budget in the room—it comes from knowing your audience better than anyone else.
About Cassandra Ong
Cassandra Ong is the founder of OtterHalf, a fractional marketing agency with a mission to bridge the marketing expertise gap of tech companies and to help give businesses the advantage they need to thrive.
Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock/ Sergei Elagin, Chinnapong
