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 🍪
240. Baking it Down - Burke Lake vs Everest
⛰️ Burke Lake vs Everest - Accomplishing small goals in 2026.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 240 - Burke Lake versus Everest, we're winding down 2025 and taking a look at 2026 through the lens of goals.
🥾 Yeah, yeah - you look back on this past year and realize you can't even remember what your new year's resolutions were, let alone whether you met them or not - and for good reason. Sometimes our "bright and flashy" goals are more claimed to summit Mt. Everest rather than to walk the local park a few times a month.
👣 While telling people you're trekkin' down the local hiking path (which is Burke Lake for me) won't garner many likes on social media, it's the "walking path" goals that actually get you to Mt. Everest, 🧗 not the other way around.
Find your "Burke Lake" and then build small steps to that. Everest will come in time - and that time may be a few years from now. But a 1% improvement across 10 areas of your business each month in 2026 = 120% improvement. 🏔️ And that is how you climb mountains.
🏔️Social Media
Instead of the mountain of "I'm going to add 1,000 followers this year," consider a small path approach to social growth in 2026.
- 🏔️ I will feature 1 local business each week on my page.
- 🏔️ I will cross-post that feature to 1 local group.
- 🏔️ Grow my page by 3 local followers each week
👍 These small steps will put you in front of your target audience who actually can place an order. I can get 1,000 followers from a viral reel or a cookie group follow train - but what then? Maybe a few likes if I'm lucky.
But three locals each week? 😍 That's 156 local people by the end of 2026 who can actually give me their money and eat my cookies. Bonus = featuring a local business = potential for corporate orders too.
🏔️ Email Marketing
📧📧📧📧📧📧📧 "I'm going to send out a newsletter every month."
Solid goal, and I love it. But if that was the same goal you had in 2025 and didn't meet, maybe it's a bit too aggressive. Let's "Burke Lake" it a bit. 💌 Just getting started can be half the battle - so break down "getting started" into three small steps.
- 🏔️ I will organize my client emails into a spreadsheet.
- 🏔️ I will sign up for MailChimp and import my list.
- 🏔️ I want to send out 1 email each quarter.
One email a quarter doesn't sound like much, but if you sent 0 emails later year, that's 4 more chances to make sales to your audience than you had last year. Plus, it's consistent, which means good marketing. If you want to send more than 4, great! But set the goal bar at an attainable distance so you're guaranteed a win.
🏔️ Websites
So many bakers start their year off claiming, "I'm going to get a new website." And for all the right reasons. 💻 Websites = more sales. But often they get overwhelmed with the myriad of endless options recommended by other bakers - Shopify, WordPress, Hotplate, MyCustomBakes, Square, Jotform, Bakesy... you get the point - it's seemingly endless.
Burke Lake-ify it. 🌐 Start by setting up a simple form. Yes, it's not a website. But yes, it'll start you in the right direction and buy you some time and space to work up to that.
- 🏔️ I'm going to start taking orders through JotForm.
- 🏔️ I will test out MyCustomBakes and Square.
- 🏔️ I will choose one of those platforms.
And if you feel like switching it next year, you can. Sky's the limit. But at least this year, you can say you got the website monkey off your shoulders.
🏔️ Photography
"I'm going to improve photography," is
