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 🍪
177. Baking it Down - When Marketing Isn't Working
😥 When Marketing Isn't Working - What to think and what to do.
🎧 This is an excerpt from this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 177 - When Marketing Isn't Working
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 177 - When Marketing Isn't Working, we wanted to talk about both mindset and methods to reboot a sluggish marketing season.
🧠 In the Diary of a CEO podcast on YouTube, brain doctor, Dr. Daniel Amen who has scanned 250,000 brains, says he was asked to scan the brain of author Noelle Nelson who was writing a book on The Power of Appreciation. 🤗 She wanted to see how positive thinking affected brain function.
The doctor then asked Noelle to return the next day after 24 hours of negative thinking to understand how the brain's baselines changed. 😥 The results? 📉 Lower functioning in the pre-frontal cortex - the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, reasoning, personality expression, and other complex cognitive behaviors.
The takeaway:
- ⬇️ Negative thinking culls cognitive performance.
- ⬇️ Inhibited cognitive performance creates more negative thinking.
- ⬇️ Thus we're in the death spiral of bad news blues.
🤔 "How does this apply to my marketing not working?"
Great question. You'll hate the answer. Marketing works because it just... works. The more people that know about a product to buy, the more people can buy said product. 💭 The how to get them to know there's a product to buy is marketing.
✅ So the good news - your problem is fixable. ⛔ The bad news? The problem is you. "No one is buying from me" dulls your strategic thinking. "Everything I post doesn't get any likes" is an easy way to never have to strategize why your posts are reaching your intended audience.
Shift your mindset by running through these cognitive questions:
- 🧠 Is your messaging confusing? Focus focus focus - switching product offerings too often can confuse your audience
- 🧠 Are your goals dialed in? Too much of everything is nothing
- 🧠 Do you have enough campaign runway? Think: run a campaign for at least 3 months to see if something works - yeah, that long.
- 🧠 Are you being consistent over long term or only energetic in short spurts?
But - if you're marketing truly isn't working and you're in no mood for brain games, Corrie and I came up with a list of six tasks you can implement this month - that, with the right attitude, should turn your marketing numbers around a bit.
- ✔️ Work the campaigns backwards: here is launch date, so where is pre-sale end date / pre-sale launch date / photography date etc. Come up with three campaigns for the rest of the year.
- ✔️ Invest in better camera / photography gear and take one photography course (ahem - the Cookie College has a photography course) - plan photography days.
- ✔️ Start adding consistent posting in community groups - make 2 posts per week (non-sales) for 1 month.
- ✔️ Work on a local likes campaign. Grow your page numbers - you'll never reach 100% of your page likes, so increase the page likes to increase potential eyes on your content.
- ✔️ Audit your sales funnel - is something somewhere driving people to your competition.
- ✔️ Audit your competition - if you can handle not comparing yourself, competitor analysis is a great way to see where you're lacking.
Try these 6 suggestions out. Hey - your marketing isn't working, you probably have a lot of spare time. What do ya have to lose? Except the yips that is.
