Galway-based Micromarketing, Ireland's only marketing consultancy specialising in small business, is celebrating its tenth birthday this month.

Pictured (L to R): Sophia Duffy B.Sc MA Senior Designer; Amanda Dolan BBS Project Manager; Ollie Walsh MBS MMII, Managing Director, Biggley, Head of Design. Photo: Morgan Photography.

"It has been a long, exciting and very enjoyable journey from when we started to here," commented Ollie Walsh, Micromarketing's Managing Director.

"I moved to Galway in 1994 after finishing a Degree in Marketing in Athlone IT and set up niche retail business Needful Things, comic and sci-fi shop which I ran with a friend of mine for four years. I did this as I wasn't, and still am not interested in big business, it was small business that interested me. From my time in Needful Things and other small businesses I had a stake in, I learned a lot about the realities of marketing a small business. The reality is the small business owner is generally over worked and under funded and needs the development and implementation of effective and efficient marketing plans to succeed," explained Walsh.

While running Needful Things, Walsh completed a Masters in Strategic Marketing in NUIG. Micromarketing quickly grew based on its unique offering to the market place, high quality service and through the development of long term relationships with customers. Some of their initial customers from 1998, like air-glide.com and Assets Furniture, are still customers today.

"As we developed the relationships with customers, they started to demand a wider range of services, including graphic and web design," recalls Walsh. "These weren't skills I had myself, and one of the most important lessons I had learned in retail was to keep overheads to an absolute minimum. Based on this, I started to develop a network of professional consultants to share the Micromarketing workload with me."

Over the past ten years, this team has developed in fourteen marketing, design and web specialists offering small businesses an unrivalled marketing service.

"We work very closely with our customers, essentially performing as their marketing and design department. A lot of small businesses can't afford a marketing manager and with Micromarketing they don't need one, we provide them with everything that comes under the banner of marketing."

In 2006 Walsh won the Marketing Institute Western Region, Marketing Person of the Year Award for his 'outstanding contribution to marketing'

Micromarketing is going from strength to strength with global success stories in the last few years. 'Being a small business does not necessarily mean you are localised to the west of Ireland' says an enthusiastic Walsh,

"For example, we have been working with Air-Glide.com since their inception in the nineties. The company only has one member who had designed a new type of golf trolley. In 2006 Air-Glide secured global distribution with One World Golf who are the second biggest distributor of golf trolleys in the world!

"For the past three years we have been working with usecash.net, which is a new internet payment method. When we met UseCash first it was an idea, it is now about to roll out nationwide in Ireland and is scheduled to be pan European in the next two years and is still a small business."

As part of the Business and Breakfast networking group, Ollie Walsh will give a presentation on marketing, in conjunction with Roy O'Hanlon from Action International Business Coaching, in the Ramada Hotel Oranmore on Tuesday 17 June. Tickets are €20. To book yours email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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