Galway company Micromarketing this month is celebrating 15 years in business. ‘It’s been a really interesting journey!’ says Ollie Walsh, founder of Micromarketing. ‘The world of business, not to mention the world we live in, has changed dramatically in that 15 years’.

The company was established to offer market research and strategic planning services to micro and small businesses in the West of Ireland. Very quickly customers, who had gotten a business plan from Micromarketing, wanted more services from the company. ‘This was based on the service we offered to customers and how closely we worked with them’, believes Walsh, ‘once the business plan was completed, the customers wanted to continue to work with us, asking us to organise design work for them and work in implementing the plan’. Based on this demand, Micromarketing grew its services to become a ‘full service’ marketing company.

‘The late nineties were a very exciting time in marketing, as the internet was pretty new, which seems impossible now! It was the first time in a generation there was a genuinely new medium for marketing, no one at that time realised how prevalent the internet would become in our lives’, reflects Walsh. ‘Working to combine the internet into marketing strategy was a very challenging and rewarding experience. What happened back then with websites, is now happening with Social Media as companies struggle to integrate it into their marketing.’

In recent years Micromarketing has refocused back on its core services of market research and strategic planning. ‘Obviously the recession had a big effect on us, but like all companies still standing, we are stronger now than we were before. As a strategy company, we are constantly reviewing our offering, what our customers need, what our competitors are doing, and importantly, what we want to be doing. Based on that we made the decision to get out of design work and focus on strategy. We specialise in working with companies expanding into new markets, and currently we work with a core of customers providing them with very specialised strategic planning for growth.’