How we made marketing solutions affordable and low-risk for small businesses

Customer service, accounting, stock keeping: Many micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) wear multiple hats to keep their businesses running. Non-operational tasks, such as marketing and advertising, tend to take a backseat. 

Many MSMEs also still lack the necessary digital marketing skills or resources to effectively promote their business online. 

The cost of advertising, too, weighs on the minds of small business owners as they may not have the means to invest as heavily as larger players. 

(Read more: The evolution of Grab’s merchant app: from order management system to digital toolkit for MSME growth)

But with stiff competition in the food and beverage industry, it’s more important than ever for smaller businesses to overcome these challenges in order to compete and stand out.

To address these challenges, we developed Marketing Manager—the self-serve digital marketing tool for merchant-partners to drive sales on our platform. Marketing Manager is now available in most markets. It will be available in Indonesia and Thailand later this year. 

We wanted to make things as easy as possible for merchant-partners to create, manage and optimise their own ads and campaigns. The best part? Merchant-partners only pay for any of our marketing solutions when they get an order from it. 

(Read more: GrabAds is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing advertising platforms)

This is attractive because it is low risk—especially useful for our merchant-partners, who are predominantly micro- and small F&B merchants. It also means that our merchant-partners will enjoy free awareness if the marketing campaign doesn’t result in a successful order.