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 🍪
152. Baking it Down - Copy This
✍️ Copy This - Copy Formulas for Beginners.
🗒 If you see a big blank space asking "What would you like to say" and your brain follows suit and also turns into a big blank space - copy formulas are you're new bestie.
🤔 First - what's copy?
📑 Copy is any text you use to sell or persuade someone to take an action (like buying cookies). So copy could be the caption on Instagram, the social media text you write on Facebook, the newsletter you send monthly, or the bio writeup you have on your website. Copy = words.
🤔 Second - what's a copy formula?
🧮 Copy formulas are different frameworks to help assist you in how and what to write. I mean - we could just write, "Buy my cookies, please - I'm begging." But we can't write that every time without seeming weirdly desperate (but where's the lie though, I ask).
Copy formulas can help us keep our ⚾ sales pitch interesting by addressing our varying audiences and their different paint points, needs, or wants. Copy formulas are plug-and-play approaches to captions - and I love them.
There are likely hundreds of formulas - and you may find you like more than others - but in this week's podcast, 🖐️ we covered our top 5 faves. Let's jump in:
1️⃣ AIDA: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.
Probably my favorite - Corrie's too. You'll find both of us using it a lot in our sales posts. AIDA covers all the peppy sales pitchy-ness I love to incorporate in my write-ups. Look at the above copy and how it falls perfectly into this framework:
- ✍️ A - Attention - Did you know I teach folks just like you how to decorate cookies just like these?
- ✍️ I - Interest - Check out Sugar Cookie Classes where I teach you everything I know about sugar cookie decorating!
- ✍️ D - Desire - The classes are 1.5 hours, 6 cookies and tons of fun! Plus - you get my very own cookie dough and icing recipes emailed to ya after class!
- ✍️ A - Action - March class is filled but my Swiftie Class still has a spot for you!
Beautiful - 💪 it's fun, interesting, and asks for the sale.
2️⃣ PAS: Problem-Agitate-Solution.
🩹 This is the 'infomercial' framework - you know, where the screen is grayscale showing someone who trips down the stairs on the way to the laundry in a way so overly exaggerated that you can't help but watch? 🤕 Then the scene switches to rather normal tasks looking ridiculously harder than they ever would be right before we flash over to the solution to all of life's problems - whatever the product is the infomercial is trying to hawk our way.
Now let's adapt it to cookies.
- ✍️ P - Problem - Struggle with royal icing consistencies?
- ✍️ A - Agitate - Royal icing can be the most difficult part of learning how to decorate sugar cookies.
- ✍️ S - Solution - We cover icing consistencies in my upcoming cookie class! You'll get the recipe we use in my class to decorate, and I'll help you work through royal icing issues!
It's more of a negative learning framework, but I like to drop it in from time to time to capitalize on the segment of the audience who is really frustrated. 😩 They may not be into a "pep rally post" about how awesome sugar cookies are, but will resonate with the "this is hard - I'm almost about to quit" approach.
3️⃣ FAB: Features – Advantages – Benefits.
Definitely the happy framework, this formula leans hard into the perks. For something as fun as cookies, you can't go wrong bein' FAB-ulous!
