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 🍪
159. Baking it Down - Excuse my Excuses
🥲 Excuse my Excuses - Don't cry unless you've tried (everything).
This week's podcast is a deep dive into a post I made in the group earlier this week - the post regarding "woe is me" threads saying the cookie industry is done, pack it up kids, you don't gotta go home, but you can stay... in this kitchen.
You see - that defeatist mentality ain't go no business being in a business-centric group. It will limit your sales and, over time, cause you to quit. Quite literally the opposite of marketing and growth mindsets.
😭 "But I've tried (and cried) everything! It's not working anymore!"
Have you, though? Have you actually tried everything? Because there are now 159 Baking it Down podcast episodes covering 159 marketing tactics. And I'll wager you aint' tried even a third of the stuff we talked about. That's what today's podcast is about.
And even if you did - 🥤 have you ever wondered why Coca-Cola, founded in 1886, ✨still✨ buys ad space at the beginning of every movie? 🎥 They've been at this for 138 years and they still keep hittin' the marketing campaign trail! It's because consistency - over long periods of time - produces results.
Marketing ain't a one-and-done. If it was, I'd be out of a job and 🤑 cookiers would be millionaires. It's repeated effort for a really, really long time. Let's jump into the post.
--
I often see people complain about their local markets in these groups.
- 🧈 The price of butter is too high,
- 📉 Competitor prices are too low,
- 👥 The market is saturated,
- 🚫 The market doesn't want cookies,
- 🎟️ Too many people teaching cookie classes,
- 🪑 Too few people taking cookie classes,
- 👎 The competition isn't as good as you,
- 😭 The competition has more tag-happy friends than you.
You get the point.
👀 There are 45,000 people here - so I get the honor of reading many contradicting opinions on why sales aren't where we expected them to be.
Teeechnically... 🙅 you can only write "the cookie game is done" if you attempted every marketing tactic covered in this group. Then, and only then, can you say with certainty that the party is truly over.
🏃 I mean - how can you say you won't win a foot race if you never ran the race in the first place? Same applies to marketing. Can't say you can't sell anything if you didn't try everything in your power to sell it.
You can't say, "No one buys my cookies" if you never told absolutely everyone that you were selling cookies, right?
So allow me to ask... have you:
- ✅ Attempted to market to commercial businesses by dropping by with a logo cookie.
- ✅ Worked on growing your review profile by getting new reviews and responding to bad reviews in a way that will increase sales.
- ✅ Focused on upping your curb appeal for in-person pickups.
- ✅ Implemented copy formulas to increase conversion rates - AIDA, PAS, 4 C's, 4 U's, Before After Bridge.
- ✅ Implented "customer delight" methods to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
- ✅ Used better adjectives to make your products and pitches sound more appealing in social media posts and emails.
- ✅ Streamlined your branding for easier brand recognition across all print and digital profiles.
- ✅ Run g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s to engage your page / group audience frequently.
- ✅ Focused on adding value to local community groups each week.
- ✅ Created your own local community group to better facilitate a value-added hyper-local community group.
- ✅ Consistently posted to your social media every week for an entire year.
- ✅ Created an email list on a newsletter sender (Mailchimp, Flodesk, Constant
