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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 🍪
189. Baking it Down - 10 Marketing Lessons from [Redacted]
🔟 10 Marketing Lessons - You can apply from [Redacted].
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 189 - Marketing Lessons You Can Apply from [Redacted], ️🎉 and this week's podcast is the LAST time we'll say [redacted] ever!!! ️🎊 *
😭 * until next year.
But with every [Redacted], there are marketing lessons to be learned - 🧠 and this year we picked 10 marketing lessons to apply to your bakery-endy (okay now I'm done making up words).
📣 The biggest takeaway from the [redacted] spamming: NO ONE is seeing your posts. 📣
That's something we just have to make peace with as marketers and design our posting schedules, content types, and social media channels around. Doesn't matter how many times I said, 🗣️ "You pend until midnight," I was still asked even until midnight, what time they would get in. 🙉 And it's not their fault!
😳 There's just so much content thrown at us on newsfeeds that reading the group rules + entry questions + group description + event description + 1,345,167 posts, 4 podcasts, 15 newsletters, 57 Reels... 👀 we just simply don't have the time or attention span to absorb it all.
❌ And your audience doesn't have the bandwidth either.
Now that that's outta the way - let's talk about the 10 tips we took from [Redacted] 2024 and applied to bakeries in 2025. Corrie made it a point to only talk about topics that could be adapted to your bakeries - 👁️👁️ so attention up front!
️🛒 1. Started Marketing Early
🤫 The [Redacted]: That was the key to this year's Vendy Blendy. With the increase in the required discount percentage, it was necessary to extend the marketing funnel to 5 months (we typically do 2.5 months in the past). ⏰ Add in a funky election year affecting reach, and in hindsight, we were really happy we got this off the ground earlier this 'round.
🍪 Your Bakery: Same goes for your bakery events - classes, vendor markets, pop-ups, pre-sales. You gotta give yourself some marketing runway, otherwise, you run out of concrete (aka money). If you think 3 weeks is enough time to fill seats in a Galentine's Day cookie class, you'll want to rethink that. 6 weeks or more of marketing can ensure that you can fill seats. And hey, once you're booked, you can move your marketing focus onto the next campaign.
️🛒 2. Increase Value / Decrease Costs
🤫 The [Redacted]: With the event that shan't be named, we required a better value proposition from the sellers - they were required to up their discounts to 25%. 💲 But to offset their increased value, we decreased their costs by lowering the registration dollars. This allowed them to protect their margins a bit more.
🍪 Your Bakery: Same with your bakery's value prop. I see folks complain about a saturated market and "Whatever should I do!?" Increase your value proposition - better packaging, better customer service, better ingredients, better pizza, Papa Johns. But if you increase the value your product has, we need to shed costs elsewhere to protect our profit. You can do that by buying in bulk, printing your own cutters, creating passive income streams, etc.
️🛒 3. Posting Schedule Ramp Up
🤫 The [Redacted]: With our marketing, you could see (if reach and Zuck allowed), an increase in our posting frequency and a diversification in our content type strategy. 📈 From back in June when I made a single post to the day of (when I made about 20 posts), that increase in posts per day - intentionally. Remember - no one is seeing anything you post. More is more when the algo is calling the shots.
