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 🍪
203. Baking it Down - Reasons to Start a Blog
✍️ Reasons 2 Start a Blog - The SEO, content, and reach benefits.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 203 - Reasons to Start a Blog, continuing on with our "lessons in websites," I wanted to talk about blogs. I know - we're all about websites when it comes to online sales - but does your website have a blog?
😅 "Uh, twins - what could I possibly blog about? Reasons people should give me their money in exchange for cookies??"
Well - kinda, yeah. You see - websites are pretty stagnant. I mean, you got the 4 main pages - home, about, service or products, contact, and then maybe one extraneous page - for cookiers, it could be a page on your cookie classes or your booking process for example.
But blogs allow websites to be dynamic since blogs are always being updated. ✍️ This fresh content allows more potential for your website to be found in search engines (Google is a search engine). That means it could be a whole new lead source that never sleeps - and a blog can help your website accomplish that.
🤔 "Okay girls... maaaybe you're onto something, but what could I possibly blog about??"
Great question - and that's what we talked about in today's podcast.
Blog posts don't have to be overly complicated, but they do have to stay on topic. And what's your topic? Local and baker - this should help you narrow down your content topics. Now - who are we trying to reach with our blog posts? Local non-baker clients. See where this is headed?
Don't worry - we'll give you some topic ideas below. Hint: you're overthinking it.
✍️ 1. Website SEO benefits
Because we can add keywords related to our product and associate those product keywords with our location, blog posts have a direct benefit to getting our websites to rank in search engines for "baker near me" type queries (aka searches). Consider this, when a local potential client googles something like, "sugar cookie classes in [Your City]," how can Google associate you with that? Through a blog post you wrote on "everything you need to know before taking a cookie class." You see the connection there? It creates... buzzword incoming... topical relevancy for Google's lil' robot crawlers.
✍️ 2. More diverse social media content
If you find yourself always sharing photos, photos, and more photos to social media, blog post content can benefit two-fold here. You can add a link to an article on "Best Date Ideas in [CITY]" (make one of those ideas attending a cookie class), and share that to your page. It's heck of a lot more interesting than just a photo of a set you baked PLUS it drives traffic to your website (traffic = people). And guess what's also on your website? Your CTAs directing that traffic to place an order. Again - you see how this is all working together?
✍️ 3. Reference topics
You can't bog down your homepage with a ton of text - that would make for a bad UX (user experience aka how real people navigate through your website). So where do we put content that's kinda important, but not important enough to be on our home page menu? Blog posts. You can add "how to defrost cookies" as a blog post and link it to any clients who need to... well, know how to dethaw a set. You can keep that concept going with, "How to store a DIY kit," or "How to use a scribe" and "What to bring to a Cookie Class" - the ideas are endless when the topics can be used as a knowledge base for customers.
✍️ 4. Local topics ripe for reshares
Okay - what did we say earlier? Both content about baking and location - this is where things can get fun. Feature a local business - sta
