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 🍪
176. Baking it Down - Cookie Crime Scene Cleanup
🦴 Cookie Crime Scene - Don't look back, look forward.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 176 - Cookie Crime Scene, Corrie wanted to talk more cognitively about approaching "bad experiences" in business.
As a business owner, 😓 you will face difficult clients. 😢 You will have someone demand a refund. 😢 You will experience broken cookies, icing bleed, cookie spread, soap tastes, stale cookies - it's business.
😭 And you will also have to deal with clients who had a less-than-ideal experience with your business. BUT - you can harness the tools now to change that experience from a bad one to a 😌 "hey, it wasn't the best, but we made it right" one.
That's why this week's podcast is called "The Cookie Crime Scene" - because oftentimes the damage is already done before you run to the Sugar Cookie Marketing Group asking for validation. 😤 "I told them to get lost in the woods, they have terrible taste in clothes let alone cookies! 🥺 ...do you think I worded it okay?"
Uh - nope. 🚫 No, ya didn't do okay on that one. But you responded with too much emotion too fast without considering the ramifications, and now you get to pick up the pieces (and those pieces are often in the form of bad reviews).
Ask yourself, "do I just want to be heard or do I want to be helped?" 😤 Let me break that phrase down: when you want to be heard only, you want to rant and vent and be angry. 😠 You want people to lambast your client alongside you. You want bakers to validate your aggressive, dismissive response.
Why ask us? You already sent the email. 🍪⚠️ It's a cookie crime scene now.
But the baker who wants to be helped - they word their posts much differently. ✍ "Hey. I think I handled this run-in with my client poorly. I responded way too hastily. I may have limited my options for recourse here, but can anyone help me make this okay with this client?" Yeah - now that's someone who wants help.
Listen - we're going to respond poorly to clients eventually. ☕ We're humans. We run on emotion and coffee, and when coffee runs low, emotions run high (amiright?).
🫖 Corrie told a story she experienced with our grandma, Ruth Ann, this morning. Ruth Ann dropped her favorite coffee cup shattering it into a million pieces. 💥 "It's okay - let's clean it up! Can't unshatter it now. Can't be mad it's broken. Being mad doesn't fix the cup - but we can channel that energy into finding a replacement online."
You can't unshatter the cup. But you can work on being a better baker despite bad experiences with clients. 💭 You just have to accept that you're here to get help - not just be heard.
Quote of the week: "🙄 Stop, Drop, Roll your eye before your reply"
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by searching for Baking it Down - Episode 176 - Cookie Crime Scene.
