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 🍪
243. Baking it Down - January Task List
📋 January Task list - A list of things to-do.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 243 - January Task List, we're tryin' out a new(ish?) format + coming up with a list of ideas you can use to get your sugar cookie bakery headin' in the right direction this year.
Could you do all of these tasks? 🦸♂ Only after you finish saving Louis Lane from the high-rise fire. ⚡ But since we're not Superman (or woman), tackling just a few of these each month could just be that one thing that puts you over your competition.
And in the world of stiff icing and stiffer competition, 🤏 every little inch counts.
💡 We're just going to list out our list from the podcast so you can reference it, and I'll add my $.02 throughout.
- ⚡ Rollover tracking spreadsheets to 2026
- ⚡ Update CRM with December contacts
- ⚡ Create an outline of your content buckets for 2026
- ⚡ Schedule out January content calendar
- ⚡ Add December contacts to newsletter lists
- ⚡ Segment newsletter lists
💡 Segmenting a list means separating the list by contact category. So let's say you taught an in-person cookie class and had 10 people sign up, and then in December, you sold 15 custom orders. That's 25 emails, but segmenting them as "📝 List - Cookie Class Attendees" and "📝 List - Custom Clients" would allow you to send really targeted emails to them in 2026.
- ⚡ Stage quarterly newsletters now (as drafts)
- ⚡ Get inbox to zero
💡 New to "inbox zero" - it's paring down your inbox until there are zero emails. Then, each day, you get it back to zero. How? 📬 Deleting, archiving, replying, labeling, and unsubscribing. Let me tell ya - it's a battle, but booooy is it refreshing not to be overwhelmed by your inbox!
- ⚡ Set up inbox labels to manage inbox
- ⚡ Audit recurring expenses
- ⚡ Setup financial tracking software (YNAB)
- ⚡ Update website to reflect 2026 offerings
- ⚡ Audit website for dead or broken links
- ⚡ Update auto-responders in email and social
- ⚡ Update social media bios
- ⚡ Replace pinned posts on social profiles for 2026 timestamp
💡 If your pinned posts are already "up to snuff," it's still worth the repost for the 2026 timestamp. Your pinned posts are the first written date your audience sees when clicking to your social profiles. 📆 Having those say, "YES, I'M STILL HERE IN 2026," signals you're in this to win this, this year.
- ⚡ Lay out an in-person cookie class schedule
- ⚡ Audit supplies - packaging, business cards, bows, etc.
- ⚡ Purge expired inventory
- ⚡ Organize and purge product photos - label for easy search
- ⚡ Organize receipts and mileage logs for taxes
- ⚡ Create email templates for quick replies to inquiries
💡 Email templates are my Gmail JAM. You can easily create them by writing out the email as a template, the same way you would write a normal email (I write in ALL CAPS and [brackets] to know which info I'll need to update every time I trigger the template). ✍️ On the formatting bar of a new email, click the three stacked dots - then hover over Templates, and finally click Save draft as template. Now you can trigger that draft every time ya need it.
- ⚡ Create a list of active, local groups to market to in 2026
- ⚡ Audit pricing to ensure costs are covered + profit
- ⚡ Update Google Business Profile with 2026 hours + holidays
