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 🍪
157. Baking it Down - Deborah Deborah Deborah
⭐ Deborah Deborah Deborah
When you've not been seen, heard, or understood.
Grab your popcorn - 🍿 we covered a buttery topic on today's podcast when a Canadian restaurant went viral for all the wrong review reasons. 🧈 Blaming Deborah in a now globally reaching door sign, Heirloom Restaurant closed its doors this April citing issues with... well, unhappy clients. 👨🍳
How did they handle it? 😠 Making unhappy clients even unhappier clients. 😡 Whether it was a staged publicity stunt or a business owner who had just finally had enough of Deborah and her depressing reviews - regardless, they're now shuttered - and here's a small... ahem... heirloom... we can take with us when it comes to replying to reviews.
(if you're as nosey as me and don't mind some colorful language - 🍅 google "heirloom restaurant Canada Reddit" and enjoy the rabbit hole).
🔟 10 Ways to Handle a Bad Review
First things first - how you handle bad reviews isn't a reflection on how well you bake - but rather how well you business. 🤝 Good business owners understand that a bad review can be a tool to secure more business. Lackluster business owners think it's a digital fight - and act accordingly - costing them time and money (even more they don't realize they're losing out on).
- 1️⃣ Understand that everyone will eventually get a bad review (or at least an unhappy client).
If we could please everyone what kind of person would that make us? See - the thing is, you can't please everyone - so fully come to terms with that, at some point, someone will be leaving you a bad review. It's just gonna happen - and once we accept that, we take away the emotion out of it.
Repeat after me: "I am a business owner. I will get a bad review. That is okay. How I handle that review makes all the difference."
- 2️⃣ Walk away - 🕒 a minimum of 24 hours (the damage is already done. don't make it well done by replying in anger).
No one died from not getting a reply to their bad review in time. Thus, take your time in replying. Waiting, thinking, and letting the offended emotions dissipate will clear your mind when writing a reply to a bad review. The last thing we want is to take a page from Heirloom and make the bad, worse.
- 3️⃣ Write a rough draft reply - 🤓 then have a third uninvested party read it.
Write a rough draft - AND BEFORE YOU POST IT - have the least emotional person you know read it first. Ask them, "Does any part of this response sound emotional or defensive?" If they say yes - change that part. We want zero emotional replies here. If you get defensive at their critique... well, I got news for ya, kiddo.
- 4️⃣ Lower your defenses. ️🥊
I can't stress this enough. Lower. Thy. Defenses. Listen - whether or not they're right - they are upset. Raising your defensiveness escalates every situation. Don't do it. If 24 hours wasn't enough to drop that cortisol level, take another 24-hour break until you calm down. Do not run your business on high alert - you'll make mistakes that'll be much harder to fix.
- 5️⃣ Acknowledge their experience as valid. 🤝
This is a huge sticking point in the Sugar Cookie Marketing group. Validating how someone feels does not mean you agree with what they said. We are all allowed to feel how we feel (even if it's wrong). Validating an emotion looks like: "I know you're upset right now."
