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 🍪
163. Baking it Down - Website 101
👨💻 Website 101 - An audit of twin2's website.
We've been working on getting Corrie a new website 🕸 - and we got the barebones bits together - so we thought it'd be fun to audit an unfinished website on today's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 163.
The big takeaway is this: there are many website hosts + templates + themes + plugins. 💻 Find what works best for you and don't be afraid to change and shift as your business grows and pivots.
⚠️ Now - this podcast focuses less on the mechanics behind the website, and more on the layout of the website along with the copy, imagery, and buttons. We explained why we used it, what we still need to edit, and things we'd like to move around a bit. That's the beauty of a website audit - it helps you know what you need to tweak!
Here's the basic layout of the website - heavy on the brand colors, big CTAs (call-to-actions), she wanted to elongate her funnel to add a form so she can further vet leads - see, it's about what works for you even if it doesn't make sense to someone else (because - you know we say to keep that funnel shorter for high converting website leads, not longer).
So what do we want to focus on when we talk website layout. 📑 Here's a starting list (note - this will be different for different bakers).
1. Find a website platform that's right for YOU.
🔗 But for Corrie's website, I went back to ol' faithful - Shopify. Why? Well - I've used it before, and I wanted to see if it changed much (hint: it changed a lot). Do I think everyone needs to use Shopify? 💻 Not at all - but for what Corrie wanted and what I had experience with, it's what we went for.
There are so m-a-n-y hosts, so don't be afraid to try them out (most have trial periods for free) to see which feels right. 💵 You may have the budget to hire someone to build your website for ya (or were born a twin), or you may want to "DIY" it and figure it all out (along with some new curse worse). Some website platforms give you tons of freedom (💔 which can break the site) and some keep it very structured (which is less customized, but also - 💢 a not broken website).
2. Keep the top CTA-centric.
Towards the top of the website - called the top bar, menu, and banner ribbons - 📣 keep them CTA-focused meaning constantly call your web traffic to take an action. ➡️ Order here, ➡️ get started here, etc. We don't want to make our most primate website real estate about the dog we had when we were 3 years old that we named our bakery after. No, no - we want their money. So make it easy for them to give it to us.
3. Add in some content that adds validity.
If they scroll past our prime web real estate, they may be looking for more trust-building. 💯 A great way to do that is through various segments of your home page that add validity to your bakery. Yeah - the very same stuff we told you to not put in the top section. Hey - they didn't buy, we need to convince them more. ✅ About me, ✅ about my process, ✅ FAQs - these can help answer questions (and address objections before they come).
4. Your branding matters.
🎨 Find your brand colors (coolors is a cool website to help you do that) and make that home page match. 🟪 The more "wow, this all matches their logo and brand identity" your website gives, the higher the trust factor from your audience.
Websites are a compromise - what works well for the bots vs the humans. What looks pretty versus what the client needs to see. What the page should say that's enough words without being too many words. You give and take until you find a design that works for both you and your clients!
