Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
👋 Hey - Heather and Corrie here with the Baking it Down Podcast with Sugar Cookie Marketing (a group on Facebook full of sugar cookiers turned business owners).
🍪 We're here to help you rise with your reach, flood with new followers, bake up new ideas, and make that all-important dough (while makin' that dough - see the pun there?)
🤑. What’s it about? We’re a Facebook Group turned Podcast, Membership, Book Club, and Baking 101 that’s dedicated to assisting bakers in effectively marketing online to generate more sales and better manage their businesses.
🧠 With free Facebook Live classes, hundreds of resources, and thousands of like-minded bakers, there’s a lot to learn in "SCM" (aka Sugar Cookie Marketing). ️🎧 As an extension of our Facebook group, this podcast is here to let you learn by listening. 📈 We'll cover group topics, marketing trends, and more (leaving this wide open in case Corrie wants to start singing).
💸 We take the sweet art of selling online to the cottage bakery world with marketing methods that move products (and pastries).👂 So open up those glorious ear canals because we have a podcast! Just when you’ve thought you’ve “heard” it all with those marketing "miracle" twins (that's our last name - not a proclamation), we’ve got something just for you each week!
🥣 As a baker, you don't always have the luxury of two hands needed to scroll in Sugar Cookie Marketing Group or crack open a book in Sugar Cookie Bookies, but what you can do is listen (unless you're my kid asking “what’s for dinner” for the millionth time).
👐 Hands full of flour? No problem! 👍 18 dozen iced cookies due tomorrow? Let’s do this. The Baking it Down Podcast by Sugar Cookie Marketing is a weekly podcast geared toward helping you grow your bakery business - dropping (almost) every Tuesday.
📅 We choose a topic each week that's either something new and emerging in the world of social media or something that we saw in "The Group" that was a hot topic and we bake it down... I mean, "break" it down for you. 🗯️ What you can expect in the podcast is about an hour of chit-chat with the meat and potatoes right at the beginning of the episode.
🥔 That’s when we dive into the marketing topic of the week! 📞 Oh yeah, folks can call / text / email in with their questions too - a fun way to hear from other bakers out there.
Our promises to you:
1️⃣ We always make it clean = no cursing. We understand that you are busy and could be around little ones while also trying to get your weekly dose of business growth so we make sure that each episode would make our grandma proud and keep it clean so you can listen while also living your life.
2️⃣ We always make it fun. There’s a lot of negativity in the world so we try and make the podcast an upbeat and fun learning experience for you. I mean, we try to make the Instagram updates and changes as happy as we can, but come on Instagram! Give it a rest! No more changes!
3️⃣ Other than that, we take a positive approach to marketing We are also *not* professional podcasters. I feel like we need to say this because, hey, sometimes we get giggles! We do our best to extend our marketing knowledge to you all free of charge each week at the cost of listening to our higher-than-normal pitched voices and the occasional giggle spree.
4️⃣ You can find the podcast on all the major platforms and you can typically expect a new episode each Tuesday afternoon (unless life happens). We invite everyone to listen.
Either start from the beginning or work backward! The episodes don’t build off themselves so you won’t be confused hearing one before the other. You just might miss new Lives we mention but you can always catch the replay in the Sugar Cookie Marketing Group on Facebook!
Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
71. Baking it Down - Marketing Campaign Life Cycles
🏃 Run, Forest, Run!
You always hear us refer to marketing in terms of "run-times" - but what are we saying when we sub in track days for calendar weeks? Don't worry - no gym routines here.
Run times refer to the number of days / weeks / months designated for a marketing campaign.
So - let's apply it to BTS (for some reason, I thought people were making Korean boy band cookies this whole time, but I digress). How can we use a marketing lifecycle to prep our audience for the upcoming back-to-school offerings?
Quick poll before we do - in a poll of about 300 SCM group members, the results on BTS offerings and run-times is interesting:
- 🏃 6 Weeks Out - 0%
- 🏃 5 Weeks Out - 1%
- 🏃 4 Weeks Out - 12%
- 🏃 3 Weeks Out - 32%
- 🏃 2 Weeks Out - 18%
- 🏃 1 Week Out - 3%
- 🏃 Not Offering BTS - 31%
Three weeks is the most popular run-time for back-to-school sets.
* I would make a disclaimer that BTS is unlike any "cookie holiday" in that it typically sneaks up on our target audience at a time when a majority of bakers have taken the summer off. I'd assume Halloween will be a bit different.
🏃 So how can we build out a "marketing lifecycle" for back to school?
Your run-times will be different than my run-times depending on your location, back-to-school date, target audience, and how prepared you are. There's no wrong answer, but if you're looking for an answer of some sort - here's mine: we start with a 6-week marketing cycle. So if your BTS date is August 29th, guess what - you're getting your BTS cycle going this week.
🏃 1. Awareness - getting your audience prepped
First stage in this 6-stage / 6-week cycle is awareness. You're not expecting to make any sales now, but your form is probably ready just in case. You're basically introducing your audience to your offerings. Kinda like the "Hey girl heeeey" posts. This is the top of your back-to-school funnel.
🏃 2. Engagement - getting your audience to react / post / like
This is the fun stage. Asking for your audience's opinions on your offerings, posting their kiddos' last first-day-of-school photos, or hosting a contest for last year's report card grades. You're still not asking for the sale here, but you are getting people excited!
🏃 3. Evaluation - getting your audience to pick you
This is where you set yourself up as the "best in the business" - whether in cute packaging, customer support (more on that later), and featuring great past client reviews. You're also telling them your pricing options, informing them of pick-up dates, and last calls. Make it *easy* to pick you, or they'll pick someone else.
🏃 4. Purchase - getting your audience to give you money
And BOOM goes the dynamite. At this stage, you ask for the sale. Make buying *so* easy. Communicate effectively. How to order. Ease of ordering. Confirmation of order. What to expect after the order. Do NOT make it hard for people to give you their money. (ps - you could also up-sell add-ons here)
🏃 5. Support - getting your audience to trust that they made the right decision
Listen - once money exchanges hands, you can't ghost to the kitchen for 2 weeks. You can have these emails already written and ready to go - even before you made the first sale. Email clients the minute they order (auto-responder), then use a mailmerge app or bcc your list to follow up a week out from pick-up, the day before pick-up, day-of pick-up, and heck, even after pick-up! Make these clients your clients for life.
🏃 6. Loyalty - getting your audience to shout you from the mountain tops
