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 🍪
132. Baking it Down - The 1 Percenters
1️⃣ The One Percenters
As admins of a group of niche cottage home bakers, we get to see a lot of questions about getting sales - and even more people thinking they can compete on price to gain traction in the marketplace.
But competing on price is a literal race to the bottom - the bottom of your bank account. Ya see, if I lower my price by $1, and you lower yours by $2, and then I counter by lowering my price by $4... well, let's just say pretty soon we'll be able to duke it out standing in the unemployment line.
You cannot compete on price. So how do we get more sales in a somewhat saturated market if we can't use discounts and deals as incentives?
Increase everything else. And I'm not saying get your boxes lined with gold leaflets - but rather increase everything but just one percent.
One percent is pretty easy. I mean - what can you do just a single percentage better than you're already doing? Let's start of with an example - emails.
Are you using a custom domain? Do you have a quick response time? Do your emails include pertinent information about the client's order confirming their details in each correspondence? Does your email signature look nice? Changing any of these is an example of increasing by 1%.
🤏 One percent sounds... well, piddly if I'm honest. If you told me I'm getting 1% off at the Vendy Blendy - I'd tell you where you can shove it (... which would be in my shopping bag because a deal's a deal, amiright?!). But 1% across a myriad of different aspects of your business can amount to major experience changes! If I changed 30 things by just 1%, I'd have an increase of 30% in customer experience for my small business.
And that is huge. 👐
Other ways you can increase by 1%:
- 1️⃣ Use custom packaging or cute accents like themed bows
- 1️⃣ Include a thank you cookie with your client orders
- 1️⃣ Offer multiple ways to pay to make it easier for clients
- 1️⃣ Have a website that includes all of the information needed to make an informed purchase
- 1️⃣ Have a top-notch communications plan with clients letting them know next steps, followups, and reminders - before they have to ask
You don't need to be the best baker with the best packaging with the best ingredients with the best turnaround times. But you can be the baker who is 1% better at replying to emails. The bakers who as a curb appeal that looks 1% nicer than the next. And a customer refund policy that's 1% more appealing than another's. It adds up.
🤏 The small things can make big differences in your bottom line.
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by clickin' here - Episode 132 - The One Percenters.
