Our Founder's Story

Marcus Neo Profile Cropped Photo

From Dating Advice for Men, to Managing Million Dollar Budgets for a MNC, To Performance Marketing for Small Medium Service Based Businesses

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs for existential reasons. They don’t conform to the status quo; they are passionate about their product or service, and the good ones eventually go on to transform entire industries. Think Sim Wong Hoo, founder of Creative, and Lim Hock Chee, CEO of Sheng Siong.

My father, barely a PSLE graduate, did everything from gas delivery to cleaning to running a chicken rice stall before eventually settling on his own fishmonger outlet at a wet market. My mother, who started working right after her O Levels, worked her way up from a clerk in a leading airfreight-forwarding SME in Singapore.

My family faced financial struggles when I was young. Whilst my mother placed a huge emphasis on my formal education, I leaned toward entrepreneurship from an early age.

I started my first business at twenty two, thinking I was Asian Steve Jobs. I failed miserably trying out SEO after spending an entire year writing blog articles one after another. There were crickets on my website with no customers. I packed up my bags and went back to university.

Fast forward 5 years later. I bootstrapped a dating advice for men’s business with only $6000 in the bank. I grew MarcusNeo.Com to 20k+ in global readers and $100000 of revenue as a one man employee. Using white hat link building SEO and paid advertising. Everything bootstrapped. I even did two commentaries on ChannelNewsAsia: one of them here.

I did EVERYTHING from website development to SEO to Facebook advertising, to copywriting to customer research to offshore team building & management… and etc! Yes, in the trenches, as an operator! No venture capital and no external funding. Simple grit, technical execution and constant iteration.

That’s when I learned lead generation is one of the most important aspects to any business.

Marcus's Entrepreneur Channel 8

The pandemic hit, an American company came knocking and I exited for personal reasons. The site got acquired by the holding company of BeyondAges.Com in 2021.

That led me to joining NextLevel Singapore, an IMDA approved digital marketing agency. I helped brick and mortar SMEs in Singapore grow their business through digital marketing. I worked on accounts from ECommerce Selling F&B products to streetwear. Even helping one of our clients scale to more than half a million in revenue with just ONE ad and ONE product.

I then had the good opportunity to take on digital marketing on an enterprise level. I joined one of the biggest banking groups in South East Asia as an e commerce specialist. That led me to manage up to 1m in ad budget and generate 1m in digital travel insurance revenue a month.

Yes, hit me with your corporate buzzwords from ‘alignment’ to start up buzzwords such as ‘product market fit’!

This is why when we build digital assets here at our agency, we take an ‘end to end approach’. Yes, buzzword once again. However, we are able to consider everything from technical SEO considerations (when building up landing pages) to brand, positioning, product, and your offer.

In our recent case study with a law firm that does civil litigation: Contigo Law LLC, we executed a lead generation campaign, but ended up helping them rank for “debt recovery lawyer Singapore” on google.com.sg page one for absolutely free. That’s a commercial keyword with at least 500 searches a month.

I like to tell people, one good marketer can entirely change your business and change your life. I hope to be that one good marketer. We hope to be that one good marketing partner.

Formally, I hold a BSc in Business Management from University of London. I am also Google Tag Manager certified and received an advanced GA4 Certification by Marketing Interactive.

These days I am funking around with simple frontend tech solutions. I like delving into human psychology and behaviour. I also hold a certificate in solution focused brief therapy. You’re more than welcome to reach out to me through LinkedIn.

The Mindset: Performance Marketing and ROI Oriented

Today, performance marketing is still a niche term in Singapore’s digital marketing industry. Yet, it’s growing.

Too many small to medium businesses get burned by lead generation agencies who disappear after the contract is signed—leaving them with slow responses, missed deadlines, and zero data to show for it.

While other agencies rely on fancy reports, lock you into six-month contracts at $500/month, or hop on monthly calls to explain why you aren’t converting leads or sales, we’re flipping the model.

Performance marketing is the only form of marketing that makes sense to me. If you spend $1 and can track a return of, say, $2, your business is theoretically scalable to seven figures and beyond—while staying sustainable and profitable.

This opens the door to long-term partnerships where we add value not just from a technical perspective, but as a strategic business partner focused on your growth.

Our performance marketing services aren’t the cheapest in town—but with us, you get clear KPIs agreed upfront, real trackable data, and the freedom to walk away if we don’t perform. No year long contracts.

Simple as that: we only win when you win.

Lion City Digital Compared To Others

Mindset & Scalability
Partnership-oriented. Highly scalable, end-to-end client acquisition systems.
Isolated ads, no landing page positioning tweaks or CRM implementation.
Quality of Leads
High-quality form submissions with qualifying questions.
Low-quality Facebook lead ads with no qualifiers.
Level of Implementation
Our team crafts your landing page content and ad copy by first understanding your industry and collaborating with your expertise.
You provide the content and copywriting. Or they provide ChatGPT-produced content.
Content Strategy
Niche-specific content that positions your USP. Industry expertise, not commoditized templates.
Stock photos and generic content. You could create better content yourself in an afternoon.
Results vs Theory
Our team publishes real-life case studies on our blog and YouTube channel.
Likes and shares but no customers. Focus on "brand awareness" because they can't drive conversions.
Cost & Retainer
You pay fractionally, only for what you need. Line-by-line deliverables. From account management to creative production.
Multi-month agreements.
Team
Singaporean founder. Speak directly to a local team designing your campaigns 🇸🇬
You speak to account managers with no expertise and offshored technicians who can't connect strategy to execution.

Niche Marketing & Advertising in the Age of A.I.

I never wanted to run a generic digital marketing agency that focuses on multiple industries at once. My case studies and testimonials reflect work across various sectors, but my approach has always been about depth over breadth.

Content is essentially free today. You can ask ChatGPT for ten different Facebook ad copy ideas to market a healthcare clinic to any small to medium business in seconds.

That is exactly why I believe the future of digital marketing will be far more niche based. Generic marketing with basic Google Ads and a bland landing page is not going to cut it. Small businesses need to work with marketers who understand their industry and can produce niche specific content tailored to their expertise and consumer relatability.

That means understanding the audience, the regulations, the language, and the consumer journey in ways that a cookie cutter agency never could.

This philosophy is why I started blogging about digital marketing for lawyers. The Law Society of Singapore reached out to invite me to speak at Legal Tech Fair 2025. I received enquiries from law firms and legal institutions via SEO, and through cold outreach and in person referrals, I signed our first law firm marketing case study.

I understand the concerns and conservatism around the Legal Profession Act and the Law Society’s advertising guidelines. I actually enjoy tackling highly regulated niches because they challenge me as a marketer. I prefer building advertising processes based on expertise and consumer friendliness rather than short term clickbaity strategies.

The healthcare services industry also fits this approach perfectly. With hundreds of thousands of foreigners coming to Singapore for medical tourism each year, there is  opportunity for niche focused, compliant and conversion driven marketing.

Why Niche Based Marketing?

SEO Consultant at Legal Tech Fair 2025

You Practice We Grow

You Practice, We Handle the Tech, Systems and Marketing

Can private healthcare professionals work alongside marketers to add value to the community while growing and scaling their medical practice? Yes, I believe they can.

I believe one good marketer can change your entire business and financial life.

I doubled the revenue of one product in five months during my previous role at an MNC. That was the result of one good marketer who looked at the data, the channels, the positioning, and the creatives, then implemented the changes required.

That is the big idea behind performance marketing.

We build the systems, ads, creatives, and customer intake processes that act like a tap. One dollar in, two dollars out, helping you grow sustainably.

That is why we are positioned as a niche based agency, specialising in generating qualified leads, building marketing infrastructure, and identifying the right digital channels that drive growth at your specific revenue stage.

Digital Marketing for Healthcare Services

Today, we are exploring the healthcare services market with the aim of working alongside healthcare service providers, clinicians, and practitioners to help them market from a consumer standpoint.

This means educating, marketing, and empowering consumers with the benefits of your clinical practice in a way that is not just consumer friendly but profitable.

You practice, you treat, we build, and we grow.

This requires a long term outlook, industry knowledge, and a collaborative relationship, as opposed to a one off cookie cutter agency that you hire and replace every month. Our goal is to be that long term partner for you.

The Dearth and Revival of My Passion for SEO

In my first business, I built my first SEO project and it helped me get my first clients.  It also garnered 20000 global readers helping me sell the business during the Covid pandemic.

Lost of My Passion for SEO

Yet many SMEs treat SEO or digital marketing like a $500 a month project that you can hire any agency to handle.

Initially wasn’t thrilled about providing SEO services and felt that the Singaporean market hasn’t caught up on both the value of a good performance marketer, and/or what a good SEO expert can do for one’s business.

Secondly, in my view SEO should only be implemented at a certain revenue stage due to it’s complexity of technical audits, content required and link building requirements.

The urgent goal should be getting you clients in as fast as the next fourteen days, and then optimizing the ratio between ad spent and customer value, for profitability. Then scale.

Enter Semantic SEO

I succeeded in my first SEO project by relying on link building and good enough content, but I never ventured into how search engines retrieve, index, and serve data.

The older school SEO operated on the mantra that as long as you had relevant backlinks, you would get ranked and get traffic.There is still truth to this today, as PageRank is a ranking signal.

However, the acquisition of backlinks had became a money game of who can pay more. I lost interest in that approach and had no desire to run an SEO link building agency in Singapore.

Then I came across Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR’s concept of semantic SEO. I saw a local Singaporean SEO consultant outrank huge agencies with little to no backlinks for competitive keywords.

That revived my interest in SEO driving me to improve my skills and study semantic SEO.

However, due to the huge complexity of SEO, I will not be providing SEO agency services for now. Instead, I will mostly stick to blogging about my semantic SEO learnings.

Semantic SEO

Some Good Stuff People Say

Take Your Service Based Business to the Next Level

Fill out a few simple questions, hop on a call, and our team will run through your current client acquisition process. Listen to our recommendations, and if it makes sense to work together, we will map out a sprint based plan customised to what you need. No retainers. Just an exact breakdown of deliverables, line item by line item. Either way, you walk away with a complimentary actionable roadmap.