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 🍪
222. Baking it Down - Return of the Twith
👀 Reach Ain’t Errythang - Focus on metrics that make money.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 222 - Return of the Twith, the twin is BACK in business, and she means business with this week's topic: reach isn't everything.
We played a clip from marketer David Glu, who lists how your audience's interactions might signal what your content isn't doing for them.
- 📈 Low Likes = Your content isn't relatable
- 📉 Low Comments = Your content isn't thought-provoking
- 📈 Low Saves = Your content doesn't add enough value
- 📉 Low Shares = Your content is not engaging
- 📈 Low Views = Your content is missing a good hook
I like this approach to diagnosing a reach problem because it doesn't allow you to say, "Well, nothing's working, I'm going to quit making content." Instead, it forces you to look at the reach problem as a symptom (🤔 "What do I need to tweak here?" versus a profile problem (😓 "Facebook is limiting my page reach.").
🔨 One of those is in your power to fix, and one of those is not.
But also consider how many people you're reaching. 30 per post? 100 per post? 1,000 per post? Seeing other bakers reach hundreds of thousands of people every time they twiddle their fingers across a keyboard can be disheartening.
But imagine you were asked to speak to a room of 30 people. Would you be nervous? Of course.
How about a room full of 100 people? Talk about a lil' perspiration station under them armpits, right?
How about an auditorium of 1,000 people? That'd be a MASSIVE audience. Yet when we see the reach of "30 people" in our Facebook metrics, out the window goes the thought that those people ARE potential buyers.
If 30 people placed an order with you tomorrow, would you be booked out for a month or two? Then remember which metrics are guiding your content focus.
Your hyper-local followers are your target audience as a local baker, so no - you were never supposed to expect to reach 100,000 people with that post, because if 95% of those people aren't able to place a local order with you, it wasn't the metric to score your content by.
Yes, focus on metrics. No, don't let the wrong metric trip you up. Reach isn't as important as conversions (aka people opening their wallets). Yes, they're related, but they're more like second cousins, not twins. When one does well, it's not always indicative of the other doing well.
🎟️ My class kit social media posts get max 3 - 4 likes. My cookie classes? Already booking out in December at $85/ticket with a waitlist. My conversion metric outperformed my engagement metric, and I'm fine with that because, to my business model, conversions are more important than likes.
Join the Main Street Cookie Collab on Thursday (ahem), August 28, 2025, at 11:00 AM EST. It's a great way to produce hyper-local content. But then take that content in a few directions. That's what a good marketer would do.
- 📸 Make the single-image Instagram Main Street Collab post.
- 📸 Make a carousel post featuring the cookie, the menu, the restaurant's facade, the lunch you ordered there, etc.
- 📸 Make a Reel outta your trip to turn the business into a cookie.
- 📸 Post your photo roll-up to a local FB group and write a restaurant review.
- 📸 Have your FB page audience vote on which business they want you to cookie-fy next.
