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 🍪
165. Baking it Down - Taking a Stab at Collabs
🔪 Taking a Stab at Collabs - The bake-down of a local collab.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 165 - Stab at Collabs, Corrie took one for the team and signed up for a local vendor collab on Monday so she can give us the bake-down this week. And I think you'll like what she has to share with the classroom.
Okay, so what's a local collab? If you're familiar with our cookie collabs on Instagram - it's not that exactly. Our digitally-based SCM collabs get a bunch of bakers together and engaging with each other on a single day for 1 hour to help boost the alg'rims.
👉 1. What's a Local Collab?
Similarly, a local collab gathers local vendors together and helps them create a referral network + content generation. The collab that Corrie' participated in was spearheaded by a local picnic planner (these are all the rage in our area now) who sourced a florist, her own picnic setup, a baker, a photographer, and 5 models to create a staged bridal shower.
We'll break down the pros and cons of these local collabs based on Corrie's "on the ground" experience this week + how to plan your own in the event you don't have your own local dreamy picnic planner.
👉 2. Pros and Cons
Rarely in marketing is anything a 100% free and clear win - there's always the give and take (we just hope the give exceeds the take, amiright?!). Same with these local collabs - they're front-loaded effort followed by repurcussion results - thus it's hard to track the value proposition until after services have already been rendered.
- ❌ Con: free work (you're likely not getting paid for this)
- ✅ Pro: Referral network + connections
- ❌ Con: No guarantees of leads
- ✅ Pro: Passive long-term lead gen (referral list)
- ❌ Con: It's only as good as the camera equipment
- ✅ Pro: Social Content + social sharing with other vendors
- ❌ Con: Lots of moving parts and people
- ✅ Pro: Most versatile baker wins
👉 3. Setting up / Joining a Collab
Corrie got lucky and caught a community group "call for vendors" posted by the picnic lady. I know in our area, there are dedicated Facebook groups for local area vendor calls. In the event that you don't have an event planner creating these collabs, you can set one up yourself. Sure, more footwork, but also - more power (muhahaha). What I mean is people tend to respect the hostest with the mostest, so use that to your advantage.
- ️🎈 If you want more wedding work, partner with the picnic / event planners
- ️🎈 If you want more birthday work, partner with the balloon garland people / face painters
- ️🎈 Joining a collab is harder to find - search community groups for leads
👉 4. Breakdown of This Collab
I'm not going to type this out - but in this week's podcast, Corrie does a verbal walkthrough of how it started, how it went down, what she expected vs what happened, and how she'd approach creating your own if this sounds like a lead generator you want in on. Regardless - it's a great way to get good content.
👉 5. Recap: Things You Wish You Knew
Rare in life do things go off without a hitch - and this local collab with so many moving pieces and people was not exempt. Being a baker, you'd have to be flexible with events that are outside or involve a lot of folks with ever-changing plans.
- 💧 "I wish I knew that there was potential for this to get rescheduled multiple times - rain dates."
- 💧 "I wish I could have known the color palette beforehand and frozen my set so I was more flexible for the rain potential."
- 💧"I wish I knew that the distance is very far from my home and thus my target audience since we can't ship in Virginia."
