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 🍪
241. Baking it Down - Stay on Track Track Track
🧮 Stay on Track Track Track - Metrics to guide your marketing.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track, the twins have spreadsheets on the brain just in time for the new year.
While yes, you can start a spreadsheet any time on any day in any month of the year, it does help to have it ready to go on January 1 - that way, you can look at your bakery's entire fiscal year, start to finish.
The key to spreadsheets and data tracking is this: first, determine the goal, then let the goal guide what you track.
If you want to become a social media influencer, you'll focus on content and views. If you want to increase sales, you're going to focus on customer acquisition. If you want to focus on corporate orders, you're going to track business networking event contacts.
That's why there's no "one size fits all" for reporting and record keeping. What your goals are in 2026 =/= the goals of your closest competitor. So stop lookin' over the fence at what they're doing and focus on the reports.
🧮 Increasing Returning Customers
Let's say your focus for the first 3 months of the year (Q1) is to cultivate returning leads. You're going to shift from finding new clients (yes, you can still look for new clients, but it's not our driving metric).
To cultivate returning clients, you may be tracking these types of metrics:
- 🔢 How many past clients did you add to your CRM?
- 🔢 How many emails have I sent to past clients? What was the open rate?
- 🔢 How many past clients placed new orders in 2026 YTD?
🧮 Increasing Corporate Leads
If you want to set a goal of increasing corporate leads, you're not going to naturally do a hard push towards cookie classes, right? That's not the right fit for the goal = corporate girly era.
To increase corporate leads, you must increase corporate exposure, and that's likely through business-centric networking events and apps like LinkedIn. You're likely going to create a segmented email list for corporate contacts.
To cultivate corporate orders, you may be tracking these types of metrics:
- 🔢 How many networking events have you attended?
- 🔢 From those events, how many contacts did you add on LinkedIn?
- 🔢 From those LinkedIn contacts, how many did you drop off a "pop-by" to?
🧮 Increase Order Totals
If you're looking to increase the total ticket sale (the amount you make per order), you're going to focus on tracking your price increase, your production costs, and your upsells.
To increase order totals, you may be tracking these types of metrics:
- 🔢 How many clients added an upsell to their order?
- 🔢 By what percentage did I increase my custom orders?
- 🔢 What was my order ticket average in 2025? What is my order ticket average in 2026?
Yes, you can run concurrent goals, you can run campaigns for various durations, and you can absolutely abandon a goal if you determine it hasn't been fitting your overall strategy. Knowing when to cut a goal off can be just as valuable as knowing when to double down.
When determining which metrics to track, ask yourself:
- 🧮 What is my primary goal?
- 🧮 And if that's my primary goal, what metrics support being able to track and determine if that goal is being met, missed, or in progress?
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or watch it on YouTube) by searching for Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track.
