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 🍪
175. Baking it Down - Wedding Vendor Recap
💍 Wedding Expo Recap - Our eddie wedding vendor expo debrief.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 175 - Wedding Vendor Recap, Corrie signed us up for a Wedding Expo - and here's our tell-all - what we did right, what we did okay, and what we wouldn't do ever again.
The event was complex, to say the least. Conceptually - it's genius. Execution - it's lacking. ✌️ The event was two days consisting of two "faux wedding receptions" - one upstairs (🪵 earthy forest theme) and one downstairs (🛼 retro theme).
So both themes had completely different vendor groups - meaning there were two photographers, two event planners, two florists, two bakers, two couple models... you get the point. All vendors were assigned a theme - the vendors didn't decide it.
1️⃣ Day 1 was a photo shoot. All the vendors set up the two themes and the photographers and models got to work. This is where they got the photos of the faux receptions (one upstairs in the venue and one downstairs outside).
2️⃣ Day 2 was a vendor expo, fashion runway, and after-party. This day was open to attendees - there was some ticketed component, but we never really figured out what that was exactly? More on that confusion later. But you get the idea of what this event looked like.
1. 👰 Marketing Prep - Build the Funnel
So we needed to start the marketing prep to get Corrie's "funnel" dialed in. 🖼️ Here's what she did in the week leading up to the Wedding Expo. Keep in mind - this is a wedding expo, 🤵♂ so she'd want her content to be wedding-specific if we drove traffic to her socials during the event. Always think in terms of funneling people to a desired action (aka purchasing for their weddings).
- 💒 Getting socials ready (reposted / pin for new timestamp)
- 💒 Posting wedding sets daily leading up to the event
- 💒 All comments / reviews responded to
- 💒 Matched energy on Instagram
- 💒 Updated forms / website
We decided we'd take Eddie - the edible direct-to-food printer from Primera (also a podcast sponsor). 🤔 I asked myself, "What would get someone to stop at a cookie booth" and 🖨 the answer was "print them on a cookie - live - as they watch." So this meant we needed some specific supplies to make Eddie work.
2. 👰 Source Your Supplies
We haven't done a vendor expo for Corrie's company before, so I had to order all the custom printed things - which meant the start-up costs for this were high (ideally you'd repeat these events and bring the cost-per-use down considerably). 🪑 I needed a custom Tablecloth (TableCoversNow for $216.60), a Step and Repeat as a photo backdrop (VistaPrint for $338.14), and an A-frame sign (Best of Signs for $128.43). We borrowed a 6'x2.5' table from my mom. I had a Sony A7C mirrorless camera with a 24mm lens. Corrie brought her Dell XPS computer, and then we had Eddie (all already purchased a few years ago).
- 💒 Ordered custom tablecloth, custom circle a-frame sign, custom step & repeat
- 💒 Purchased add-on carrying cases for easier transport
- 💒 Pre-baked 45 Eddie blank cookies + 1 sleeve of Mom Pop pre-dipped cookies (for backup)
- 💒 50 QR Code printed cookies + business cards
3. 👰 Do a Setup Dry Run
I'm a planner - so a dry run for setup and workflow was a must if I wanted to get any sleep the night before. I build out the dimensions in an app called Whimsical. We were limited to a 6x6 event space, so lemme just say - it was gonna be tight.
