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 🍪
171. Baking it Down - Say It, Don't Spray It
🙊 Say It, Don’t Spray It - How to ask for help in the groups.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 171 - Say It - Don't, Spray It, we wanted to cover a topic to help us help you help us. Because it's how you ask questions in Facebook groups that dictate the kind of answers you'll get.
Depending on how you asked it, 🤩 you're either going to get really solid advice that moves your business forward, 🚮 or you'll end up with bottom-of-the-barrel, trash comments that do nothing other than get you even more worked up. 😡
🔑 You hold the keys to your own post - 🔓 whether your post gets locked or not is really up to you - the OP (original poster). And when you post in a way that garners good advice, it makes the group a better place.
👿 And when you post spun content that makes your client look like the devil's stunt double, you give the mod team more work - 🔒 because your thread will get locked by the mod team. It's our job to keep this space a resource for folks, not an echo chamber of the worthless comment, "🏃♂ RUN."
🤔 Ask yourself: "What am I looking for with this post - advice or validation?" If you're looking for validation, reconsider posting altogether. 💥 We aren't here to clean up a crime scene. If you want advice, we're your people. 🚔 We can help prevent the cookie car accident altogether with the right strategy.
If you find somethin' in here that looks like what you've asked in the past - no hard feelings. Your thread is a learning lesson to everyone, and for that, I am thankful (now stop posting threads that get locked, mkaaaay).
🙊 Example 1 - Unhappy Client Help
Let's start off with unhappy client help. It's a guarantee in business (and life) that you won't be able to please everyone. As such, dealing with upset clients is a business-ownership guarantee. How you handle that separates the proverbial "men from the boys" or should I say, "the business bakers from the business boo-ers."
😡 Spun Bad Question:
- "I took a last minute order, it was rushed, I fit her in - she begged! My icing wasn't perfect, but now she's upset about how they turned out. I wasn't even going to take the order and I let her know that it wouldn't be perfect, but she's saying the icing isn't the right color. I tell them in my terms that icing won't match, so she knew that going into it. I don't have time to rebake, and I will not refund her. What should I do? Any help?"
🤔 Alternate Healthy Question:
- "I took a last-minute order and in hindsight, I shouldn't have. I broke my own boundaries, and I acknowledge I have a hard time telling people no. The cookies that include piped names have bumpy icing - not my best work by far. What should I do in this situation? The client is unhappy with those cookies."
🙊 Example 2 - Pricing Wheelin' 'n Dealin'
Example 2 - a client who pushes back on price. It's a bummer when the client doesn't just pay the asking price but thinks there's room for bargain hunting. While likely there isn't much wiggle room, we can still play ball - in fact, that's likely what they expected you to do (remember - there are people who operate off the premise, "the answer to every unasked question is no, so ask").
😡 Spun Bad Question:
- "I secured a corporate recurring order and now they want to know if I can lower the price! They waited until after we nailed everything down and frankly, I don't want to work with them anymore anyway, but I want her to know I won't do business like that. How can I tell them they're being unfair?"
🤔 Alternate Healthy Question:
- "I secured a corporate order - and it would be a nice recurr
