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 🍪
114. Baking it Down - We Would Like to Formally Apologize
🙏 We're Sorry
Okay - I'm not really sorry - but I'm sorry you think you can't be sorry, and I'm here to help you learn how to be sorry as a business owner - sorry if you were hoping for a sorry.
We see it posted often in the groups: NEVER APOLOGIZE - it shows WEAKNESS. It also makes you 100% RESPONSIBLE and AT FAULT.
And those comments are not wrong. There are types of apologies that do more harm than good for the apologizer - and that's what I think they're talking about. Apologies that break down your own boundaries and signal to folks that you're a doormat waiting to be walked on are the types of apologies we do want to irradicate from our vocabularies.
Examples of "poor apology form" in business look like this:
- 😓 "I'm sorry you're mad at me."
- 😓 "I'm sorry I forgot - please don't be angry."
- 😓 "I'm sorry that I didn't understand what you were saying."
- 😓 "I'm sorry - what do you want me to do to make you happy?"
Now - these are general, so put ya pitchforks down - there are times and places where these apologies may be a valid response - but we're talkin' broad strokes for this podcast.
But never apologizing? Imagine being in a relationship with a spouse who never apologized. Yeah - that'd be... tough. Every time they felt wronged or offended, they never got the emotional release that an apology gives.
👉 Here's what a therapist told me once: "Every emotion is valid even if you don't agree with it."
So - when our clients have an experience we don't necessarily agree with - that emotion they're feeling is valid. We're not apologizing for "messing up," but rather we are apologizing for their unfortunate experience.
It's the intention of the apology that makes all the difference. Are you apologizing because it's a trauma response from a childhood wound? Or are you apologizing to empathize with the client and work towards a resolution? We want to get to the latter and work on abandoning the prior.
Examples of "poor apology form" in business look like this:
- 😊 "I'm sorry that you weren't happy with the moisture content in those cupcakes, what can I do to make this right?"
- 😊 "I'm sorry you didn't make the pick-up window - can I leave it out for a porch pickup for you?"
- 😊 "I'm sorry that there's a bit of confusion with the ordering process - I do require pre-payment to ensure I have the funds to get supplies for your order. Would you still like to move forward?"
- 😊 "I'm sorry that your experience wasn't what you'd hoped, and I'll take the feedback back to the kitchen with me. I appreciate you letting me know."
🧠 This week's podcast is a little more cognitive than usual - but understanding the art of apologizing is one of the sharpest tools in the business owner's toolbelt, and we thought it'd make for a good conversation. I'm sorry if you don't agree 😂.
