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 🍪
137. Baking it Down - Surviving Q4
😵💫 Surviving Q4 - the fight for the newsfeed
It's the time of yeeeear... when the reach is low and the engagement is even lower. What gives?! I'll tell ya what - the deep pockets of big corporations capitalizing on the "year-end consumer" who is primed to pay.
It's a fight to the feed death in Q4, and we've got some tips and tricks to help you gain some ground.
🥊 Reset Expectations.
We're in a battle of the business and the newsfeed is the fighting ring. Bigger companies with bigger pockets are paying bigger bills to win Facebook bids. Lots of 🅱️ Bs, but the 💯 A+ will be earned by the page that understands this and uses it to create compelling content to fight through the feed clutter.
💁♂ Listen - it's going to be harder to reach your audience. Your engagement will be lower. And that's okay - because knowing this will help us to create a better campaign to adjust to the deeper pocket punches.
🥊 Be Annoying.
Corrie is very adept at this (lol). But seriously - no one is being annoyed by your posts because no one is seeing your posts. So 👏 be 👏 annoying! And don't just post the same thing 10 times - yeah, that's not ✨quality✨ annoyance. We need to be ✨creatively✨ annoying.
- 👊 Use the Stories feature.
- 👊 Host a Facebook Live.
- 👊 Post a Reel.
- 👊 Create a poll.
- 👊 Make a feed post.
- 👊 Run an ad.
All of these are features to sneak into the feed and annoy your audience in a way they don't think is annoying - but it's everywhere all the time.
🥊 Be Consistent.
Be consistent! It's so easy to get all those holiday orders in, tuck your head between your legs, and head off to the kitchen only to reappear in January wondering if all the sales followed the groundhog back into his burrow. We may get busy - but we can't be too busy to market - unless we're willing to leave the sales to our competition who is willing to be present on their pages.
🥊 Test. Test. Restest.
Your audience shifts into 🧠 "year-end consumer brain" in Q4, and adjusting your content will be a necessary step in making sure we're still resonating with that audience. How are we gonna do that? Test and retest! Long-form content (example below), short-form content, different creative (aka pictures), videos, Lives, emojis (Corrie thinks I use too many... 🙂😄😆😅😂🤣😊😌).
Test it - see how they respond. Then retest it again - see how they respond ✨ again ✨. Wash, rinse, and repeat until your audience is primed to react, respond, and reach for their wallets. What works in 1️⃣ Q1 isn't likely going to work the same in 2️⃣ Q4. Adjust accordingly.
🥊 Learn to Pivot.
📆 Sometimes you hoped your audience would like Advent Calendars and sometimes your audience just happens to 🚫 not like Advent Calendars. 😭 We can't cry over spilled meringue powder - but we can pivot!
💃 If advents don't sell, swing back by pivoting to DIY kits - test, test, and retest and see if that hits your audience's sweet spot. Test PYOs, test cookie classes, test DIYs, test customs - and keep pivoting until you find the product your target audience flips for.
🥊 Admin Day.
Set aside an admin day - this is a day you are NOT allowed to touch a Bosch, Kitchen-Aid, or oven. On this day, you realign yourself each week to stay on top of posting, follow-up, invoicing, and customer relations. ❌ This day SHALL NOT BE A BAKING DAY ❌ - 🤑 no matter how tempting the rush fee charge may be.
