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 🍪
66. Baking it Down - Why Why Why Why Why
Why Why Why Why Why.
🤔 Never thought we could learn how to run a root cause analysis from the kid in the back seat of your car, did ya?
I'm working through a college-level textbook on Operations Management - and the book referenced root cause analysis - to figure out what the true problem is.
🤕 Oftentimes, we grab a box of bandaids and run around patching the symptoms of bigger issues, shocked when - you guessed it - the bandaid fails and you're stuck grabbin' more bandaids and spending more time well, band-aiding.
😀 But here's the good news.
❌ You're doing it wrong.
Hear me out. You're diagnosing the wrong problem. You're diagnosing the symptom of an underlying issue. And unless you figure out how to find that deeper issue, you won't see any long-term results from your short-term fix.
🕵️ So how do we find the root cause? Welcome the 5-Whys. No - I didn't make this up, it was actually in the 400-level textbook. You ask why five times - at the fifth "why," you've probably found the real issue, and now you can get started on fixing it.
Let's play this out:
Issue: 🤕 My USPS shipped cookies arrived broken to their destination. 😭
1️⃣ Why? USPS handles packages roughly.
2️⃣ Why was USPS able to break them? I didn't package the cookies with bubble wrap.
3️⃣ Why didn't you use bubble wrap? I didn't want to spend more money on packaging or insurance.
4️⃣ Why did you want to spend more on packaging and insurance? I didn't charge enough for this order to account for that additional cost.
5️⃣ Why didn't you charge enough for the order? I don't know my costs, so my pricing didn't reflect the additional packaging required.
✅ Ah - so the root cause is inappropriate price points for shipped cookies.
So - challenge: Why your business.
Ask why - and keep asking. "Why are my clients showing up late?" "Why is no one leaving me reviews?" "Why are my classes not filling up?" Ask why - and then keep on asking. You'll be surprised (and delighted) with where ya end up.
Did ya oot cause analyze your biz? Tell us where your 5-whys landed ya. Feel free to start a thread in the Sugar Cookie Marketing (Group).
