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 🍪
167. Baking it Down - Getting Corpy Orders
💼 Getting Corpy Orders - A campaign for corporate girly eras.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 167 - Getting Corpy Orders, Corrie wanted to switch from telling you to get into corporate orders and now tell you how to get corporate orders.
Corporate orders are great - they have higher dollar amounts, bigger order totals, repetitive simple designs (hopefully), and could become a consistent recurring order. Corporate clients' "cut-to-the-chase" approach to ordering saves a ton of back-and-forth and the limited scope means simplistic designs.
But, as always, there's no such thing as a free lunch and the same applies to corporate orders.
👉 1. Set up a GMB / GBP on Google Maps.
"Google Business Profile is my #1 corpy lead source." Okay - that's her answer folks, when I asked Corrie where she's getting corporate leads. And for good reason. Google Maps is a great way for a cold audience (cold = audience who has never heard of you before) to find your listing. But businesses aren't magically added to Maps (unlike websites like Yelp and Bakerias that use scrapers to populate listings). You have to actually list yourself, go through a verification process, fill out the profile, and continue to build out the profile by adding posts, updates, and pics along with getting good reviews.
The Onesday Wednesday shows a pic of Corrie's GMB profile. You'll see no address? That's because it's set up correctly - as a service area. There's a big suspension campaign rolling out for incorrectly listed profiles on Maps. Unless you have a brick and mortar, you are a service business (even if clients pick up at your door).
👉 2. In-Person / Referral Corpy Client Acquisition.
Probably the least liked but the most effective tip on getting corporate clients: in-person outreach and network referrals. In the wild world of internet marketing, "cold email" is the least effective method of outreach. Why? Because it's the easiest. The easier it is, the less effective it is. And that's why in-person outreach is so effective.
- 🤝 Go to in-person networking events (BNI, Chamber, Toast Masters)
- 🤝 Utilize LinkedIn and LinkedIn Company Page posts.
- 🤝 Go to a home show / vendor show with printed cookies.
- 🤝 Ask for businesses to be "test mules" for printed cookies.
- 🤝 Use the Mainstreet Collab approach to recommend businesses to your audience (and tag said business).
- 🤝 Market to the companies you're already paying (landscaper, the plumber, the nail salon, the dentist)
👉 3. Add a Corporate Page to your Website.
Dedicate an entire page on your website to corporate order clients. Tell them exactly what they need to know, what they need to tell you, and how this will play out. Corporate clients are b-u-s-y. They don't have time to go back and forth about their hopes and dreams. They want to know how much, how fast, and how many. Build out that page for efficiency. Bonus if you include a corporate-only intake form on that page only.
👉 4. Offer Delivery (when legal).
Most corporate orders are for events. Some are for holiday gifts, but let's focus on events for this tip. These corpy clients are busy managing a grand opening. The last thing they want to do is drive to your front porch. Offering delivery for these clients (even if you don't deliver) can seal the deal. Feel free to charge for it too - time is money, and they know that. "Your order is $600. You can pick it up in [City], or I can deliver it to your business for $X." Make that money, honey.
