{"id":191,"date":"2026-06-29T10:08:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T10:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/mra-grant-overseas-digital-marketing-singapore-sme\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T10:08:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T10:08:56","slug":"mra-grant-overseas-digital-marketing-singapore-sme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/mra-grant-overseas-digital-marketing-singapore-sme\/","title":{"rendered":"Fund Your Overseas Digital Marketing: How Singapore SMEs Can Claim Up to 70% Under MRA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Expanding into a new overseas market is expensive and uncertain &mdash; which is exactly why so many Singapore SMEs put it off. What far fewer owners realise is that the government will co-fund a large slice of the <em>digital<\/em> side of that expansion: the localised website, the international SEO, the overseas ad campaign that actually wins you customers in the new market.<\/p>\n<p>The scheme is the Market Readiness Assistance (MRA) grant, and from 1 April 2026 the support level for SMEs rose to <strong>up to 70%<\/strong>. If you&rsquo;re thinking about selling into Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, or further afield, this is one of the most useful &mdash; and most underused &mdash; pieces of funding available. Here&rsquo;s how the digital part works, what actually qualifies, and the one rule that decides whether your claim gets paid.<\/p>\n<h2>The grant, in one paragraph<\/h2>\n<p>MRA is Enterprise Singapore&rsquo;s scheme for helping SMEs break into new overseas markets. It&rsquo;s structured around three pillars &mdash; overseas market promotion, business development, and market set-up &mdash; capped at S$100,000 per market in total. The pillar that matters for digital work is <strong>Overseas Market Promotion<\/strong>, which carries a sub-cap of around S$20,000 per market and now attracts up to 70% co-funding for eligible SMEs. That&rsquo;s the bucket your overseas digital marketing is claimed under.<\/p>\n<h2>What digital work you can actually claim<\/h2>\n<p>This is the part most owners don&rsquo;t know is even on the table. Under the promotion pillar, the digital activities that typically qualify include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>International SEO and SEM<\/strong> &mdash; optimising your site to rank in the target market&rsquo;s search engines and language, plus paid search campaigns (Google Ads, LinkedIn, or the local equivalent) to generate leads there.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Website and content localisation<\/strong> &mdash; adapting your website, landing pages, and marketing content for the new market: language, messaging, and cultural fit, not just a copy-paste translation.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Region-specific social media marketing<\/strong> &mdash; building and running campaigns on the platforms that actually matter in that market, which may not be the ones you use at home.<\/li>\n<li><strong>E-commerce listing and setup<\/strong> &mdash; listing or subscription costs for global e-commerce platforms with international reach, and tailoring an online store for the target market.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Localised landing pages and UX<\/strong> &mdash; professional optimisation of the pages your overseas campaigns drive traffic to, when they&rsquo;re part of the market-entry campaign.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In other words: most of what it takes to be <em>found and chosen<\/em> by customers in a new country can be co-funded.<\/p>\n<h2>The 2026 twist: getting cited by AI in your new market<\/h2>\n<p>Here&rsquo;s a forward-looking angle worth building into any application. Ranking on Google is now only half the battle &mdash; increasingly, buyers in a new market ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to recommend a provider, and being the business those tools <em>cite<\/em> is the new front page. The smart version of an overseas promotion scope in 2026 moves beyond keywords toward &ldquo;citable authority&rdquo;: creating market-specific, genuinely useful content that establishes you as the credible answer in that region.<\/p>\n<p>That&rsquo;s essentially Generative Engine Optimisation aimed at a new market &mdash; and it can sit inside the promotion pillar, funded at up to 70%. For a business with no brand recognition abroad, it&rsquo;s one of the most cost-effective ways to get discovered.<\/p>\n<h2>The one rule that makes or breaks your claim<\/h2>\n<p>Now the honest, important part &mdash; the thing that gets claims rejected. The work has to be genuinely tied to entering that <em>specific<\/em> market. A general refresh of your corporate website does not qualify. Digital marketing is eligible only when it&rsquo;s clearly built for the market you&rsquo;re entering.<\/p>\n<p>The sharpest expression of this: assessors expect evidence of <em>new content created and adapted to local market preferences<\/em>. Simply translating your existing Singapore-centric website into another language is often rejected. So:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A general website redesign &ldquo;to look more modern&rdquo; &rarr; <strong>not claimable.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>A Vietnam-specific localised site, Vietnamese-language SEO, and a Vietnam-targeted ad campaign, scoped as one market-entry promotion project &rarr; <strong>claimable.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Scope it as market-specific from the start, and keep the deliverables mapped to that market, and you&rsquo;re on solid ground.<\/p>\n<h2>What it&rsquo;s worth<\/h2>\n<p>The maths is straightforward. Within the roughly S$20,000 promotion-pillar cap, at 70% support, a S$20,000 overseas digital campaign would see about <strong>S$14,000 reimbursed &mdash; leaving roughly S$6,000 of net cost<\/strong> to put a proper, localised digital push behind a new market. Across the full S$100,000 per-market cap, you can layer promotion with business development and set-up activities for a much larger market-entry programme.<\/p>\n<p>One thing to plan around: MRA is reimbursement-based. You pay your vendor first and claim back afterwards &mdash; there&rsquo;s no advance funding &mdash; and reimbursement comes only after a complete, documented claim.<\/p>\n<h2>Don&rsquo;t trip the application<\/h2>\n<p>A few rules sink more applications than anything else, and they&rsquo;re all avoidable:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Apply before you commit.<\/strong> If you&rsquo;ve signed the contract, paid the vendor, or started the work before submitting, it&rsquo;s treated as a retrospective application and rejected. The application comes first, always.<\/li>\n<li><strong>One activity, one market per application<\/strong>, with each project running no longer than 12 months.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Use a vendor who can produce audit-ready paperwork<\/strong> &mdash; detailed invoices, proof of completion, and deliverables that match the approved proposal. If the documentation doesn&rsquo;t hold up, the claim gets stuck at the end.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What&rsquo;s changing in 2026 &mdash; plan for it<\/h2>\n<p>Three moving parts are worth knowing before you build a plan. The 70% SME support rate runs from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2029. From the second half of 2026, the &ldquo;new to market&rdquo; restriction is being relaxed, so you&rsquo;ll be able to use the grant to scale in markets where you already have a small presence. And in the same window, MRA is being merged with PSG and EDG into a single consolidated grant called EDGE, with a combined annual limit per company. None of this changes the core opportunity &mdash; it just means timing your application well is worth it.<\/p>\n<p>(As with any government scheme, this is general information rather than grant or tax advice, and the rules are mid-transition right now &mdash; confirm the live eligibility for your specific scope with Enterprise Singapore before you commit.)<\/p>\n<h2>Where Oasis Web Asia comes in<\/h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This is squarely the work we do. We build the localised websites, landing pages, international SEO, and AI-search visibility that an overseas push actually needs &mdash; and we scope it as market-specific from day one, so it qualifies, with the documentation and deliverables an MRA claim requires. It&rsquo;s the kind of web development Singapore SMEs can lean on to enter a new market without carrying the full cost themselves. We&rsquo;ll also flag the sequence that protects your claim: get the scope and quotation right, apply before anything is signed, then build.<\/p>\n<p>If you&rsquo;re eyeing a new overseas market and want the digital side done in a way you can co-fund, that&rsquo;s exactly the conversation we like to have.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/contact\">Start a conversation &rarr;<\/a><\/strong> &mdash; get a free consultation with our Singapore-based team.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Singapore&rsquo;s MRA grant co-funds up to 70% of your overseas digital marketing &mdash; localised sites, international SEO, and AI-search visibility. What qualifies, what doesn&rsquo;t, and how to claim it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grants","category-web-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oasiswebasia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}