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 🍪
197. Baking it Down - Lessons from Susan Reed
🕵️♂️ Susan Reed - A scammer's lessons in marketing.
Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 197 - Lessons from Susan Reed (now watchable on YouTube, don't forget), we wanted to talk about common scams - but not in the way you'd expect.
We want to find out what marketing tactics make scams so effective. And we've come up with 5 takeaways for lessons we can steal (on brand) from Susan Reed and company.
If you're unacquainted with ol' Suzy, she's the name for a common scam where an event planner reaches out asking for a very specific set for her upcoming corporate event. She names a place, time, and location - ironically exactly in the same city as the unassuming baker.
Once you take her order, she pays you. Which would all be well and good but she makes a mistake and accidentally overpays you - by just a hundred bucks (give or take) on top of the nearly $1k she intended for the baker. The baker is notified of the mistake and returns the overpayment.
A few days later, the baker's bank reports the entire transaction as fraudulent, the e-check bounced, and the baker is out the refunded amount. But the marketing question lies in what made the baker believe the lie? And that's today's podcast.
⚠️ 1. Be Consistent.
If there's one thing Susan Reed is, it's consistent. And in marketing, you have GOT to be consistent. Corrie and I say folks shouldn't worry about an oversaturated market - they should worry about their lack of consistency because it's inconsistency that will lead to someone gobbling up your market share.
The unfortunate part of inconsistency is that its results are not immediate. 📆 That break you took all of January? 😭 You'll see those slower sales in July - when we are truly fighting for each and every baked buck.
⚠️ 2. No is not the Final Answer.
In marketing, "no" just means you've not found a way around an objection. 🛑 "No, we're not looking to switch bakers" should sound like, 👂 "The deal you pitched isn't good enough yet, what else do you have to offer?" A salesperson sees no as the interlude to a yes. Same with Susan Reed. She emails thousands of bakers and keeps emailing - ❌ even if 1000 told her no - 1️⃣ because all she needs is 1 yes.
⚠️ 3. Cold Outreach (on repeat).
Cold outreach ain't for the faint of heart, but it works! 🥶 Cold outreach means reaching out to someone you have no prior relationship with (be careful when cold emailing, there are some laws around this). But reaching out to a 🧊 cold contact is how they become a 🔥 warm contact willing to talk business. Look at Suzy - every baker she reaches out to is a cold contact - it's because her pitch is so desirable that she gets bakers on the hook for hundos.
⚠️ 4. Concise and Clear Communication.
The reason why so many bakers fall for Susan Reed's antics is because her initial email is so clear and concise. ✍️ She tells you what she wants, when she wants it, how she wants it, what she'll pay for it, and how to deliver it. It's such a great approach to emailing: clear and concise.
⚠️ 5. Steal. LoL Jk. Efficient Follow-Up.
Finally - steal. 🦹♂️ Just kidding. Don't do that no matter how tempting. 📧 But the final point is efficient follow-up. While the "Susan Reed" emails are likely a script running to thousands of bakers at all times, it seems like the follow-ups are actual scammers, and they get replies because they reply so quickly. ⏰ They do this on purpose - the less time you have to see if they're scammers, the more likely you are to fall prey to their schemes.
