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 🍪
161. Baking it Down - Mmmmmm
🤝 Mmmmmm - A meeting framework (that works).
About two years ago, Corrie and I started meeting (well, 😭 she was kicking and screaming) each Monday for what later became known as the 📅 Monday Morning Marketing Meeting with the Miracles. The MMMMM for short.
😕 Meetings can feel pointless unless they, well, have a point. And that's where meeting frameworks come in clutch. A framework is a meeting structure - and there are so many you can choose from. The MMMMM is built from the EOS Level 10 Meeting Agenda (not mine, just what we use), 📌 and it's been really solid in helping us get a grip on where we're goin' and how we plan to get there.
🔑 Now the key to this meeting is consistency - same time, same day, each week - take notes.
Meeting Details:
- 🤝 Duration: Not to exceed 90 minutes
- 🤝 Time / Date: Exact same each week
- 🤝 Frequency: Once per week
- 🤝 Meeting Notes: Required (I just keep a running Google Doc each week for notes)
I recommend finding a study buddy (aka accountability partner) who is a baker that is similar to you. Meaning if you bake cakes, find a cake bakin' buddy. If you're doing this only part-time, find a like-minded part-time hustler. Introverted? You can do this on your own! Just make sure you are holdin' yourself a-c-c-o-u-n-t-a-b-l-e.
Now here's the framework - we've tweaked this a bit to fit our own needs, so feel free to build from this base yourself.
- 🤝 Check-in (5 minutes) - this is where you start off with a positive mindset. We like to do a "one good personal / one good business" check-in from both of us to kick it off. 🧠 Puts everyone in a positive mindset and it's fun to hear good things about each other.
- 🤝 Scorecard Update (5 minutes) - This is simple - only report on the key metrics. Don't assess them - just state them. For example: I made 4 posts this week. 💯 Total Facebook reach was 1,230 users. I brought in 6 leads this week. I converted 2 of those leads. My average sale this week was $78 dollars. My total revenue this week was... you get the point. Find the key metrics for your business and record them here.
- 🤝 Rock Update (5 minutes) - Rocks are quarterly goals. You set up a quarterly "Rock" and then you give an update on it. For example, a Rock can be "teaching cookie classes in Q2." 🪨 Since we're in Q2, this will be a Rock we're working towards. An update would be, "I secured a location to teach classes" or "I signed up for the Cookie Class Kits to use the materials to teach my first class." (shameless plug)
- 🤝 Customer/Employee Headlines (5 minutes) - These are any major company updates or any wins you've received from customers. You can announce you're discontinuing a product, adding a new product, or a 🥂 5-star review your client left ya on Google.
- 🤝 Action Item Review List (5 minutes) - This is where you review you last week's "to-do" list. What did ya get done, how it went, what it produced, etc. This is not where you add to your to-do list nor where you asses why things didn't get done - that's the next step. ✅ This is just a "what did you do last week" point.
- 🤝 Issues: Identify / Discuss / Resolve (60 minutes) - The meat and potatoes of this meeting (meat-ing?), the IDS portion is where you talk about roadblocks, where they're coming from, and what you can do to work past them. This is a good place to break down bigger, more overwhelming tasks. 🚧 For example, "teach a cookie class" is too big. What do you need to do first before you can teach a class? Secure a venue. Add "reach out to venues to find a free location" to your to-do list for this week.
