Today's Guest

Sandy Lohr, CEO of Matchcraft, the little-known but powerful tech company managing small business advertising campaigns in over 44 countries. Sandy shares about the latest trends in consumer search and how businesses are reaching their customers in today’s evolving marketplace. Also, where she sees growth opportunities for local businesses and what they must do or risk failing.

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Episode Summary

Despite what it may sound like Matchcraft is not a dating service rather we help match buyers and sellers to local businesses that offer the products or services they need. Our services are primarily sold through resellers that are looking for a way to scale their offering to local businesses. We are a global company with advertising campaigns in over 44 countries. 

In today’s economy, the consumer drives it all and they have so much more access to information and channels that influence their buying decisions. Thus, we work hard to ensure our client's information shows up where consumers are shopping and we simplify the process for the local businesses that are trying to reach those consumers. The driver behind this simplicity is performance, we don’t have to think about where the dollar should go and we let the technology shift the focus as performance changes. 

Being a global company we began to feel the impact of the pandemic in various markets at different times starting with Europe and progressively across all of our markets as the months dragged along. As it relates to the small business climate, the longer those businesses remain closed the greater likelihood those closures will be permanent. Yelp released an interesting study where they found that 55 percent of the businesses closed today are likely to remain closed.   

Consumers are making a play and it’s not just Amazon that’s winning, consumers want to shop local and help support small businesses. Order online and curbside pickup or who is open has become a more important search terms than say near me which use to dominate. From a local business perspective, there is a great opportunity to gain market share if you are creative in how you offer your products or services. 

As it relates to big tech we feel consumer privacy and ensuring customers are made aware of their choices are the primary areas big tech companies should be accountable. There are so many ways consumers can protect themselves today but they aren’t always educated on how to do that. I think there is a misnomer out there that cookies are bad whereas I think it is great to have more targeted and relevant ads delivered to me as a consumer. But I do think educating consumers on the choices out there has to be more of a focus. 

I see an opportunity for small businesses to leverage large consumer platforms like Amazon and Wal-Mart to sell their products online. While it might not make sense to sell every product online I do see a way for them to generate additional revenue through those types of platforms. However, I also believe local businesses that are selling products and not offering an e-commerce option will not survive. 

Resources Shared

• MatchCraft
• Yelp Study on Business Closures 
• DuckDuckGo
  

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