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 🍪
133. Baking it Down - Corporate Girly Era
💼 Corporate Girly Era
Corrie was on a mission this year to enter her ✨corporate girly era✨ - 👨💼 a time in her life (and business) where she gets most of her leads from small to medium-sized businesses (and heck - at this point, international businesses).
Why? 🧦 Because corporate clients rock baker's socks - that's why. Here's the magic of corporate orders:
- 🏢 Single POC likely
- 🏢 Deep business pockets
- 🏢 Basic Designs (heyo, logo cookies)
- 🏢 Potentially for recurring orders
- 🏢 Large-scale orders typically
- 🏢 Very little back and forth
😣 In the world of lots of detailed custom orders with clients breathing down your neck, fighting you on pricing, and showing up late for pickups while asking for discounts - corporate orders can be a breath of fresh air.
And a really great way to diversify your income streams. 🌊 That way when the summer vacay season comes, your lead sources don't dry up as they head for the waterfront with the kiddos.
SO - you're in, and you want a slice of this corporate cake. 🍰 But how? Here's our 6-step workflow to getting into your ✨corporate girly era✨.
💼 1. Your content has to shift.
To attract corporate, you must become corporate - well, at least your content has to feature it. Don't have a corporate order to feature? Make one up! Find a business you can feature and then surprise the business with a logo cookie.
💼 2. Secure the tools.
When we say corporate, we mean quick - and often to a larger scale than customs. We ain't bakin' for baby turnin' 1 no more, we're baking for large events where the "corp client" likely wants to hand 200 folks a cookie with their logo on it. How can you work at scale? Invest in the tools to do so. Here's what we've got:
- ✨ Airbrush machine
- ✨ Cricut for stencil cutting
- ✨ Bosch for big batches
- ✨ Eddie for D2F printing (direct to food - gutter folk)
- ✨ 3D Printer for custom cutters
This stuff ain't cheap. Eddie alone is $3,000. A Bambu Carbon (which we happen to be giving away TWO at this year's 2023 Vendy Blendy) runs $1500. BUT - with these large-scale corporate orders, we are pulling in large-scale corporate checks which is a great way to cover the investment costs of these machines and then some.
💼 3. Nail down the corporate tech.
💰 Nothing says "small beans and risky at best" than a baker telling a corporate client to pay them PayPal "friends and family" so the baker can skip out on taxes. If we want corporate money, we gotta look corporate ourselves. 📧 Get that custom domain - it's $12 bucks and that custom email while you're at it - it's only $6 and makes a 🌎world🌏 of difference when it comes to looking legit.
- ✨ Get a Custom Domain / Email
- ✨ Send the invoice from an Invoicing Software
- ✨ Get your government EIN
- ✨ Set up a Business Bank Account
- ✨ Maybe get a Business Address (UPS sells these)
- ✨ Have your W9 ready to go
- ✨ Setup business Insurance (just in case)
💼 4. Start a corporate outreach campaign.
Well, if stuff sold itself, I'd be out of a job. Fortunately for me, it doesn't - but that means we need to design a marketing campaign to reach our business buddies. Email lists - yes, BUT - segment them out. Make a list for just corporate clients. It'll make a lot more sense to send them team-building packages. Not so much to the baby who just turned 2 who you baked for.
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by clickin' here - Episode 133 - Corporate Girly Era.
