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 🍪
190. Baking it Down - How the Grinch Saved Christmas
💗 How the Grinch Saved Christmas.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 190 - How the Grinch Saved Christmas, ️and we're BACK and Frank is DIZZY. 😿 Heather came back from a 10-hour trip to a sick Frank who turns out had an inner ear infection that led to him gettin' an early start on the kitty somersault Olympic tryouts.
But back to baking - December is a rough time for bakers. On the one hand, with all the marketing work we laid all year, we're finally able to cash in during the "Cookie Super Bowl." On the other hand - my goodness, it's a lot of work.
It's easy to become jaded by our clients during this season. While we're "baking spirits bright," we ourselves are neglected during the holidays. It's the price we pay in the industry we have chosen to be in. But it's important to stay focused on the goal: a really solid business that sustains itself both through slow and busy times.
So how do we stay focused without becoming embittered by the long hours and late nights over the kitchen oven? Here's a few tips from Sugar Cookie Marketing.
🎄 1. Manage Communications
'Tis the season to get behind on emails. When (see: not if) clients send an angry message about something you messed up (or they think you messed up), wait 24 hours to reply. For all other messages, set expectations. "Hey! Thanks for the email - I'm looking at 24-hour response times, but rest assured, I'll get back to you!" goes a long way in quelling the fears of your customers. If you've not replied to January inquiries, make a note to reply before your next "Hey, I'm taking orders" scheduled post goes up to stave off upset would-be clients.
2. "This will be the best experience they will have."
Corrie and I taught a Christmas cookie class last weekend. Factor in the weekend before, we were circa Vendy Blendy, it was easy to have a bad attitude with two overly long working weekends. We took a deep breath and said, "This is our cookie class attendee's Christmas season kick-off. Let's make it the vibe." And the same goes for you - a lot of your clients are excited about their orders. Make it the best gift they've felt that they have ever given by perking up your attitude.
🎄 3. Custumers =/= Therapists.
You're tired. We get it. Customers aren't therapists. It's easy to turn a pick-up into a vent sesh of all the orders from all the difficult people who don't understand all that goes into cookies. Word of caution: don't do that. Corrie and I frequented a delightful local Thai restaurant, except the owner wasn't so delightful. What was one lunch turned into an hour-long vent session about clients who don't tip. Here's a tip: don't do this.
🎄 4. Happy Cappy - Clean, Brushed, Smile
I hate telling people to shower and makeup when frankly, I don't like doing it. But boy does it help paint the picture that we're the happy, hearty bakers our clients expected to open the door. Think about it - would you want to see your mechanic driving in a hoopty with squeaking brakes? Or about how your real estate agent living in a dump? We want to image the folks we hire are what you believe them to be - same with our bakers. We want to think your kitchen is clean, your house smells good, and you're happy to serve every client with the freshest baked cookies ever to come out of an oven.
️🎄 5. Use AI to keep it friendly.
Nothing says, "I'm too busy for much effort" like "sent from iPhone." In the world of AI everywhere, we hardly have an excuse to not let the robot overlords have their way with our curt emails.
