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 🍪
108. Baking it Down - Economies of Scale
⚖ Economies of Scale
Buzzword incoming: scalability. The ability of your business to increase output to lower costs of production and increase profits. Sounds enviable, right? But how do you go about it as an often one-man (or woman)-band? Here are 5 tips we've thought of that may help you scale to higher margins and less work:
🥶 1. Freezing Cookies / Icings
Brrrr - coolin' down your cookies can heat up production. Freezing dough and cookies can allow you to produce when orders are low and when incoming orders pick up, you're teed up for the big thaw. You can thaw cookies with no risk of loss of freshness for up to 4 months - including already iced cookies.
🧊 Cool-down pro-tip: store them in sealed cello bags in an air-tight container. When ready to thaw, allow the entire unopened container to completely thaw before opening - this will let the condensation form on the outside of the container and not the cellophane wrapping. This means that you can increase production for Christmas cookies in September and allow the economics of scale to pad your fleece-lined pockets come the holidays.
2. Get the Gear
When it comes to scalability, increasing production by decreasing production times = more money. A great way to do that? Don't fight your gear. Find tools that help you increase output and decrease time investment. This will let you make more money while making more cookies = a win-win, and you may even be able to binge a Netflix show without being hunched over the countertop decorating late at night (ayo - posture correctors!). Examples of tools that increase scale are:
- 🔧 A projector
- An airbrush machine
- 🔨 An Eddie food printer
- 🔩 A dehydrator
- ⛏ A 3D printer
⬆️ If it can increase production or ⬇️ decrease time spent producing, it'll support the economies of cookie scalability.
🤖 3. Let the Robots Take Over
I don't know if you're worried about the robot overlord takeover, but for now - letting the internet handle mundane tasks will allow you to increase production while the "always on" internet handles data input, task management, and client outreach. Zapier is one of our favorite "scalability" tools because it lets two apps that can't shake hands, now shake hands. 🤝 Ways we use webhooks to streamline time costs are:
- 🦾 Auto-response messages sent to new signups
- 🦾 Turning an email into an Asana task
- 🦾 Adding a cookie event to GCal from Eventbrite
- 🦾 Adding new Cookie College signups to Google Sheets
👨💻 4. All Praise the VA!
VAs or "virtual assistants" are like contracted employees without the employee costs because they work on a task basis and not an hourly basis (depending on your contract). Finding a VA who can handle data input, client reminders, email marketing or social media is a great way to scale your business because you're behind the computer less but more is getting done. So start your VA-dating now so you're ready to hire come the hurried holidays.
👀 5. Ads aren't all Bad.
I love the 24-7-365 salesman that Facebook ads can be - optimized for views, link clicks, or messages, dialing in a solid ad campaign can help you move product without having to make community group posts = you increase production and decrease time (a recipe for a double-dollar win). Using Ads Manager, you can create ad campaign parameters that stretch your ad dollar to the furthest.
