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 🍪
140. Baking it Down - Vendy Blendy Marketing-Endy
🙊 Vendy Blendy Marketing-endy
and what you can learn from our blendy blunders.
We may not be allowed to talk about "the event that shall not be named," but that doesn't mean we can't learn from it! A lot of marketing goes into the yearly Vendy Blendy, and it seems like each year we learn a little more from both the Vendys and the Pendys (turned Spendys).
So let's take a look under the hood on how the Vendy Blendy can help your bakery market better in 2024.
🔊 1. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat
3️⃣ We marketed this event over THREE months to over a hundred thousand collective followers across our socials. I'd wager we made over 150 posts dedicated to this event across all the accounts. We dedicated podcasts to it (20,000 monthly listens), newsletters (6,000 subs per email), and the SCM family of groups (over 50,000 members). It was a lot of marketing. And yet 2 hours before the event, I still had folks asking me "What a Vendy Blender is?"
Your marketing isn't being seen - so you gotta repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it again. Your audience just isn't seeing as many of your posts as you think they are.
🔊 2. Chicken and the Egg.
🐔 The Vendy Blendy requires both Vendors to sell and Penders to spend. 🥚 But Vendys won't sign up unless the Pendy numbers are high. And no one wants to pend if there are no shops to Vendy. 🐣 What do? We had to market both - back and forth - until we got both numbers high enough.
Much like marketing a cookie class, you'll have a chicken / egg scenario. 🏢 You need a free venue to make your margins so you tell the host you'll bring people to their shop, but 👨👩👦 you need people wanting to take a class to be able to secure the free venue. Market to both. Ask your audience if they want to take a cookie class. Then tell the venue, "Look, I've got 20 people interested in walking through the door a business that lets me host." Then turn back to the audience and tell them you've secured the venue - you just need to sign up.
🔊 3. Two Separate Campaigns.
👥 Corrie was assigned "Vendy Aquisition" and 👥 I was assigned "Pendy Aquisition." ✌️ These were two completely different marketing strategies running congruently, but completely separately. The messaging to one audience (get some great marketing and make some solid sales numbers) was completely different than the other audience (hey get some great deals!).
You're going to need to do the same things - 👉 a campaign for classes, 👉 a campaign for your farmer's market event, 👉 a campaign for customs. They'll be posted to the same page, sure - but they'll be completely separate campaigns when it comes to marketing (targeting, messaging, CTAs, etc.)
🔊 4. Diversity in Marketing Channels.
😕 "I'm worried I'll annoy my audience." No - because you'll diversify your outreach. You can post to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, email list, Google Business Profile, TikTok, FB Groups (Community and VIP). Sure - you may annoy yourself, but diversification in your outreach strategy will allow you to hit more targets across more websites.
Just like the Vendy Blendy - 🎙 we have people that listen to the podcast, 👍 but don't use Facebook. 🖼 People that use Facebook, but aren't on Instagram. 📑 Some folks just want the freebie transfers in our emails and don't need the group content! D-V-E-R-S-I-F-Y.
