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 🍪
123. Baking it Down - The Gold Ratio
🪙 The Gold Ratio 🪙
I know some of you are screaming at your computer screen right now sayin' "IT'S GOLDEN RATIO!" But hold up, now ya hear! It's a play on words (but trust that 99.9% of other times it's a typo - but this time it isn't... surprisingly).
In marketing, it's easy to fall prey to numbers. Numerical evaluations are THROWN at us daily. Just consider all the math problems we see as marketers turned business owners turned back into marketers.
- 🧮 Followers on Instagram
- 🧮 Reach on Facebook
- 🧮 Comments on Group Threads
- 🧮 Open Rates on Emails
- 🧮 Class Tickets Sold on Eventbrite
Hey - I thought we promised ourselves we'd never take a math class again, right?! 😳 Well = welcome, class is in session, get your bottom in a seat like your bottom line depends on it, because it does. But not in the way you think it does.
I'd be lying if I didn't say math wasn't important in business. It is. I live and die by my spreadsheets (which are essentially my digital children at this point). Math lets us predict, decide, and determine which direction we need to head towards. But addition and subtraction (outside of the business bank account) ain't the move. ️🥁 We want... drum roll... ratios
😱*screams in Algebra 2*
Ratios are comparisons. One number, related to another number, knocked up against each other to give us a percentage. The numbers we're comparing? ️
️Us today ️🥊 vs. 🥊 Us yesterday.
You see - comparing how many followers a baker-influencer has to your hyper-local bakery in rural America ain't doin' your mental state any favors. And it's not a good barometer for effective marketing progress either. But you know what is? ️🎯 You today compared to how many accounts you were reaching in your target local audience this time last year.
So - here are other "gold" ratios (still destroyin' some of ya with that play on words, huh?) 😂
- Engagement Ratio - how much engagement in relation to your total follower count are you getting per post? If you had 20 followers and got 20 comments, you'd have a 100% engagement rate (and 1:1 ratio).
- Class Seating Ratio - we only can seat 10. If I sell 9 seats, my 9:10 ratio means my class is at 90% capacity. If someone is teaching a class to 20 seats and sells 9 tickets, their ratio is 45% even though we sold the same number of tickets 😳 comparison truly is the thief of joy (except when we compare ourselves to ourselves).
- Presale Ratio - presales work on made-up numbers (or how many Miss Cookie Packaging boxes you ordered). "I sold out!" can literally mean anything. In fact, folks be "selling out" and then selling 10 more FOMO orders. It's relative.
- Booked Ratio - same with the "I'm BOOKED" posts. Booked in relation to...? See - it's relative. It's a ratio. If they were only going to take 5 orders this month, and took 5 orders - they have a 100% booked ratio. If you were going to take 30 orders and took 20, you'd only be 66% booked.
- Click Through Rates - emails just like this one are relative too. The last week's Onesday Wednesday was sent to 3,834 emails and 1,971 of you opened it (for the free transfers, I know, but I can pretend otherwise). That's a 51% open rate.
- Profit Ratio - probably the most important one to a business owner - let's knock up our profit % against last years'. Are we increasing our profits by decreasing costs, increasing efficiencies, and increasing price through added value? Yes? YOU'RE DOING GOOD THEN.
