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 🍪
162. Baking it Down - Tags vs Tips
🤑 Tags vs Tips - The bottom line is the bottom line.
This week we cover a topic that can get some bakers into trouble - hiding in the bushes of their exes. Kidding - that was our mom, but the concept still applies when it comes to stalkin' our clients.
The issue arises when we feel we're owed more than just the money we made for an order. As someone who loves to peek over the fence of past lovers myself, it can be tempting to sneak a peek at a client's Facebook page or business page to see if they've posted pics of their party... and then to turn a lil' sour when you realize they did and just conveniently happened to forget tagging your and your bakery business.
😣 "Well, twins - referrals are the lifeblood of my lead sources! I need tags and shoutouts to earn more income. And you said you're business-centric, right?! It's okay if I comment, "So nice baking for this event - I'm the cookie baker, @[tags business passive aggressively]."
I hate to say it boo-bear, but your "praise" was piles o' cash and anything beyond that just ain't owed to you. While yeah - the tags are awesome, the posts full of praise about you amazing, and the emails fawning over your fantastic flood can make your toes curl... it is not owed to you.
📚 In the book, No More Mr. Nice Guy - a book written for men, but still some great takeaways - 🤫 Robert Glover talks about "covert contracts" - these are contracts made not in writing. And that's what's happening with this whole bein' owed beyond the bread (ahem - casheesh).
I see this happen in the Marketing Group - 😣 bakers who feel as if they're owed more than just the money they were paid. It's a quick recipe for resentment, and we're here to break up with the bad mojo.
1. Your money is your motivation.
💵 Fall in love with money (within reason). What we mean is: your only job was to bake cookies. In exchange for those amazing cookies, someone gave you the life energy they exchanged with their employer in the form of money - they gave you some of their life - 🤑 and the money was the physical representation of that. That was the contract. Nothing more. 🍰 Anything additional is icing on the cake (that they proverbially paid for so - again - not required).
2. Stop stalking.
🙈 Blinders are the best way to tune out the torture of wondering if you were tagged. You can't know what you can't see, right? Stop stalking your clients (and while we're at it, your exes... right mom?). If you can't stop from looking or party pics are showing up in your feed, Facebook has a "mute friend" option - use it.
3. Create review-generating assets.
😩 "But twins! I need tags to get leads!" Sure - leads do come from tags, but they also come from good reviews - so instead of stalkin' your client, send a follow-up email asking them if they wouldn't mind leaving you a review on your Facebook Page or your Google Business Profile. 📑 If you think you should be allowed to market to their party attendees, use a Munbyn thermal printer to throw a cheap printed sticker on the back of each cookie (adding the ingredients can help it look less like "PLEASE HIRE ME" and more like "hey - allergies include, but also... hire me, maybe?"
4. Incentives for reviews.
🎁 Not my favorite approach - but when it works, and if you work it right, it produces great results. The thing about thinking you're owed tags is likely because you're too dependent on word-of-mouth for your lead gen. By building up other lead sources, you can grow... well... other lead sources.
5. Learn to let it gooo.
