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 🍪
129. Baking it Down - How You get Them is How You Keep Them
🍿 How Ya Get 'em is How Ya Keep 'em
Things we want when we market:
- 🤩 High engagement!
- 🤩 Exponential growth!
- 🤩 Reach as wide as the Atlantic - heck the Pacific!
- 🤩 Big Numbers!
- 🤩 Lots of Likes!
- 🤩 All the money in the WORLD!
But what don't we want? All the above if you went about getting it the wrong way. Such is the topic of this week's Baking it Down Podcast - how you get them is how you keep them.
🛒 Let me break it down for ya with a marketing case study as big as your local mall: JC Penney and the discount disaster.
JCPenney rose to fashion fame in the 70s when couponing was a common practice for 65% of US households. 🎫 Coupons are not like sales - because a sale is the equivalent to "no promo code required" versus a glorious coupon - this hard-to-find code or cut-out paper that grants the holder something ✨no one✨ else gets - a discount.
🧠 Talk about hittin' the centers of the brain that casinos take advantage of.
🛑 But in 2012, the JCP CEO Ron Johnson didn't follow the principle of "how you get them," and decided to move from couponing to a fair pricing model. No longer would customers have to hunt and peck through papers and internet deal sites to find the best discount - 📈 now the entire store would be just priced fairly - low prices throughout - no promo code necessary.
📉 JCP's sales tanked 25% that year. Ron was fired after 17 months, and the coupons were added back to the store's business model. Ron was quoted saying, "coupons were a drug." And their customers were addicts.
👏 How you get them is how you keep them.
JCP built a business bankin' on budget busters discounted with coupons. So it had to keep them by sticking with the coupon cutters. 🔥 Same with your business. If you drum up business by doin' fire sales - guess what your audience will be built on expecting? You guessed it - last-minute discounts.
Want to be a controversial baker? 🍿 Go post controversial topics on your page. Guess what your audience will be expecting? Popcorn-poppable drama dripping in butter and bad words. Sure - you'll get engagement, reach, comments, and reactions - but what good are they if they don't convert into sales. 🤑 Money. 🤑 Dollars. 🤑 Income.
👏 How you get them is how you keep them.
🏝 You can't pay your bills with gossip (trust me, I'd have a private island if you could).
🚂🚃🚃🚃 Same with follow trains - what good is an international audience of 1,000 bakers when you can only ship locally to people who don't like baking so much they'll pay you to do it for them? Choo-choo, followers boarding, profits gettin' off at the next stop!
Build the audience you want to keep - 👏 because how you get them is how you keep them.
