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 🍪
116. Baking it Down - Check the Check Lists
📋 Checking the Checklist
🤔 Heather: "I feel like we're forgetting something."
🙃 Corrie: "Yeah - I'm getting that vibe too."
🤔 Heather: "Whatever it is, it's big."
😬 Corrie: "Oh most definitely."
So - full confession: Corrie and I completely forgot the icing (and one tub of PME sprinkle eyeballs) at this weekend's 🐠 Under the Sea 🐠 sugar cookie decorating class. 😨 Imagine my horror as we enter the venue, 30+ minutes from the "icing fridge" only to realize my frosting aphasia.
🚙🚓 With the power of Acura, Corrie managed to snag the icing and valiantly return right before class started (and to fix the "eye" issue, we turned the seahorse into the not-so-seeing-horse to source some PME sprinkles).
Needless to say, this weekend was not our A-Game.
So what gives? How could we have taught this many cookie classes and forgotten the most important thing (next to my award-winning one-liners)?!
We technically had a process in place, but blame laziness (or Heather's unreliable car), we didn't follow protocol, and we paid the price. 👀 So - we figure we'd review our Cookie Class Kits checklist now so we don't have a repeat of Saturday (my Botox bill can't handle that stress level again anytime soon).
Every good class starts with a promotional schedule. People can't buy what they don't know is for sale - so we want to start with a promo checklist. I'd likely recommend repeating this entire list three times total depending on how registration and run-times look (we shoot for a 6-week promotional schedule for classes).
Class Promo Checklist
- ✅ Create Event Listing
- ✅ Schedule Social Posts – Instagram 1
- ✅ Schedule Social Posts – Facebook 1
- ✅ Post to Nextdoor 1
- ✅ Post to Community Group X 1
- ✅ Post to Community Group X 1
- ✅ Post to Community Group X 1
- ✅ Send out Newsletter 1
- ✅ Post to VIP Group / Email Best Clients
Next up - the Class Prep list - this is the list you'll likely want to start around the same time you start promotions - so for us (when we check our checklists), that'd be again around the 6-week-out mark. Think: class supplies.
Class Prep Checklist
- ✅ Order Cookie Cutters / Print STLs
- ✅ Order Piping Bags / Bag Ties
- ✅ Dough Prep and Freeze
- ✅ Icing Prep – Order Meringue Powder
- ✅ Order Storage Containers
- ✅ Plan Gift Cookie (sample cookie – optional)
- ✅ Order Sprinkles – Black Peals
