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 🍪
180. Baking it Down - Reach 4 Q4
🎯 Reach 4 Q4 - Gaining reach in a complex Q4.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 180 - Reach 4 Q4, we cover reach in a hard-to-reach moment in time: Quarter 4 of the calendar year.
And not just any calendar year - it's a Q4 including an election, economic policy shifts, major weather disasters, global wars, port strikes, and black Friday.
🖐️ Talk about a reach ruckus! All of these major events competition for one really tiny phone screen? You're going to be in the trenches trying to get eyes on your cookie classes, platters, and customs. But rest assured - this is how marketing works. It's how it always has worked and will continue to work.
This is what separates the "marketing men" from the "marketing boys," and of course, we have some tips to guide your socials for the next three months.
A big part of this is adjusting expectations. Yes - your reach will look different. Yes, we'll still play ball with Meta. Yes, that will be frustrating. But yes, it's still our busy season and we may not even really notice as we're elbow-deep in dough. But having a strategy to guide us in confusing times is always a solid move.
🖐️ 1. Shift the type of content you're posting.
We're no longer posting "loved making this set - Happy second bday, Timmy" and expecting likes or reach. That won't cut it in this cut-throat algorithm of Q4. We're going to dig into hooks, emojis, copy formulas, better photography, MORE eye-catching images, selfies, behind-the-scenes... basically, we're going to be more interesting for the algo.
🖐️ 2. B-e D-i-r-e-c-t.
This feed is BANANAS - b-a-n-a-n-a-s! So don't make your already distracted audience jump through hoops to buy from you. Yes, in a perfect work, we as perfect sales-bakers are perfectly able to get someone into our sales funnel and land the coveted conversion. But baby, this is Q4! Rest is for the weary and time is fleeting! We only have their attention for 3 seconds, use that to your advantage. Posting the price in the caption - or maybe even in the photo - for DIY kits and classes and stop the back and forth-ers from sucking up time (and losing interest).
🖐️ 3. Be annoying.
Corrie's got a PhD in being annoying, so consider her a knowledge expert. But on that note - channel your inner Corrie and post consistently and frequently. Corrie suggests doubling your posting schedule. Remember - reach is DOWN, you're not being annoying, you're barely even reaching 2% as is. They're not seeing any of your posts. You're not being annoying, you're barely being noticed.
🖐️ 4. Contest / Gi-veaw-ays / Memes
This is low-hanging "content" fruit, but it does create increased reach. Use the increased reach to grow another medium (like email) that doesn't compete with crowded news feeds as much. Content buckets help diversify this type of content: meme, informative, sales, prompt, back to a meme, etc. I tend to hit up the meme bucket on "big event" days - more on that next. Note - please give the podcast on g-ive-a-ways a listen, there's some stuff to be cognizant of.
🖐️ 5. Follow big events and plan content accordingly.
For example, November 5th is ELECTION DAY. Your cookie content will perform extremely poorly this day. Don't launch your presale on that date. Frankly, don't launch your pre-sale from Nov 1 - Nov 8th. Let the political stuff die off a bit, then launch your Elfie on a Shelfie pre-orders. We have a lot of "big days" coming, be aware of what's going on and how it'll affect your content schedule.
