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 🍪
202. Baking it Down - Calling All Actions
🔊 Calling All Actions - What are CTA’s and how to use them.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 202 - Calling All Actions, we wanted to talk about a digital marketing buzzword that'll increase your bottom line - and it's stupid simple.
📞 CTAs - otherwise known as Call To Actions - typically seen as buttons on a website's home page. These lil' buttons tell your users what you want them to do. And they're direct too - no beatin' about the bush when you've got next to no room for additional characters.
And you know them because you have been clickin' on these little commands for years. They're the buttons that say:
- 📣 Order Here
- 📣 Add to Cart
- 📣 Buy Now
- 📣 Get 15% Off
- 📣 Play Now
- 📣 Subscribe
☎ Yep - those are CTA's - 🤏 small, concise phrases typically displayed on website buttons telling you the next action to take in the buying process. And you should have them on your website, social media, bios, and print materials = because they work.
Creating a solid CTA is both simple and complex - because while we don't have a ton of space to work with, we still need to find the optimal command to get our web traffic to take an action. While it may be tempting to make all your CTAs "BUY FROM ME," there's a bit of strategy (and testing) that goes into them.
📣 1. Be concise and direct
CTA's are concise and tell the user what to do. "Stream here," "Join here," "Sign up here" - it's very clear what the next actions to take are. We want to keep that concept in all of our CTA's. Wish-washy, too long, and mumbled messaging is a CTA-killer. "Maybe if you want to join the newsletter I send out sometimes, you can click here... if you want." 🥺👉👈
Yeah - that's not going to cut it for a solid CTA. Short. Clear. To the Point. The next step. That's the goal with the CTA.
📣 2. Use action-oriented verbs
Do this. Stop that. Click here. Subscribe there. Buy this. Add that to cart. Each CTA should include a verb - because we're calling people to do an action. That's how they work. They command people to take an action. And we, the sheeple, love to be told what to do next. We're conditioned to look for CTA's to guide us through a website's user experience.
📣 3. Highlight benefits
If you look at our revamped sugarcookiemarketing.com website, you can see I marry each of our CTAs with a reason why it's worth clicking the button. "Join the community... to get free bakery marketing help." "Stream the podcast... to learn one marketing tip each Tuesday." The CTA tells them what to do - the supporting text tells them why they'd be stupid not to do it.
📣 4. Make them visually appealing
CTAs are typically associated with buttons - so make them buttons POP, baby girl! If you look at the SCM (sugar cookie marketing) website, you'll see I opted for bright pink buttons in our brand colors + white bolded text. I even added emojis where possible to further draw attention to my money-maker buttons.
📣 5. Keep it simple
CTA's should be single-step commands. "Sign up here" takes them to your newsletter registration form. "Book now" should take them to your booking page. "Add to cart" should immediately add the baked item to carts. Now is not the time to increase your funnel. CTA's are intended to decrease funnel length, and that means a shorter buying process (and less time to second guess whether they should splurge on custom cookies or not).
