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 🍪
166. Baking it Down - Ask and Ye Shall Receive
🙏 Ask and Ye Shall Receive - Because if you don't ask, the answer's no.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 166 - Ask and Ye Shall Receive, we covered the unfortunate necessity to ask for what you want in business. For those of us who d-r-e-a-d rejection, not asking for what we need to get our business up and runnin' like a well-oiled machine is a "coping" strategy to avoid the word defeating word "no."
But per Corrie's experience in car sales - ABC, always be closing. Always be asking for the sale. Always be asking for that review, always be asking for the next step needed to close the deal on that cookie class space.
Ask and ye shall receive an answer. Whether that answer is yes or no doesn't matter - the answer, regardless of what it is, gives you the next step in your business. If the answer is, "No, we don't want to host your cookie class in our cafe," guess what? You now have the opportunity to ask some place else instead of always wondering what the answer could have been had you just stuck out your neck a lil' bit.
"So, what do you think we need to ask for?" Look at you - already asking questions. We're off to a great start, and of course, we gotta list.
👉 1. Ask for reviews.
Ask for those reviews. In a podcast poll taken in the Sugar Cookie Marketing group this week, over 55% of bakers NEVER ask for reviews. Talk about a SWOT analysis pointing a bright shiny arrow at "getting more reviews will increase your leads," right? Would you hire a remodeling company without checking their reviews first? No? So why do you think your clients are any different?
👉 2. Ask for social shares + likes (engagement).
Treat this like a content bucket you only dip into every other quarter or so - but asking for support from your audience (what I like to call "pity party posts") works because it appeals to the emotional needs of the small business owner. Posts like, "If you can't order from me, you can still support me by liking and commenting" or those posts that open yourself up to your audience explaining how hard it is to fight the big corporations when we're all boot-strapping our businesses can really boost the likes and thus the algo-reach.
👉 3. Ask for email signups.
Just like the Onesday Wednesday newsletter - I don't get signups from you guys unless I ask. Like - I have to make a post every week asking folks to sign up for the free transfer sheet in the newsletter otherwise our email list grows by a whoppin' 0. The fastest way to grow an email list? Ask for people to sign up for it.
👉 4. Ask for understanding from family.
Hey - running a business ain't for the faint of heart - and running a business and a family at the same time is an Olympic sport. Asking for understanding, space, and time from the family to run your business can go a long way. It'll help you set better expectations with them and allow you to work sans the guilty feeling we get when we're buried in our phones during a family event. As always - keep a healthy balance between work and home life. Business will eat up everything you give and leave no crumbs.
👉 5. Ask for grace from customers.
I don't think we give customers enough credit for being understand, imperfect humans just like us. We're so busy strapping on our boxing gloves to realize that if we just ask for understanding when we make mistakes, our clients are often happy to give us some elbow room to fix our "oopsies."
