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 🍪
245. Baking it Down - Gimme Gimme Strategic Giving
🎁 Gimme Gimme Strategic Giving - The strategy behind strategic giving.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 245 - Gimme Gimme Strategic Giving, it's the season of requests to donate, sponsor, and give to local causes, PTAs, and networking events.
It's all about strategic giving in January - and we're here to tell you - it ain't all bottom line blues when it comes to this form of marketing (you see that right there? We didn't categorize it as "selling").
🎁 First up - What is strategic giving?
Strategic giving is the opportunity presented to your bakery to partner with companies that move your business forward, while not necessarily generating income at the immediate start.
🎁 The benefits of strategic giving.
With every strategy, there are pros and cons - but for strategic giving done right, I think there are more positives than negatives.
- 🎀 Giving is good, makes you feel good
- 🎀 Support your customers
When it comes to strategic opportunities, consider your local audience first - they're likely connected to communities, causes, and PTAs - a win-win when you can support them and get exposure.
- 🎀 Reach people you wouldn’t normally reach
- 🎀 Cheaper than paying for an ad
- 🎀 Create relationships with new people
- 🎀 Showcase you working in your community (rally behind a like goal)
- 🎀 Get more orders
Strategic giving is marketing. In the same way you'd run a Facebook ad and spend money to acquire new customers, donating to a raffle can have the same effect - but the catch is it's a slow burn. 🔥 Patience is key with this form of marketing.
- 🎀 Break into an industry
- 🎀 Downside of strategic giving
🎁 Downside of strategic giving.
Like we said - what goes up must come down. With anything that has benefits, it could also cost you, and with strategic giving, that's build into the name. Because it's a gift, there's no guarantee of a return on your investment. But in another way - the return is the *feel good* feelings you get from supporting a cause or community.
- 🎀 You might not get any new customers
- 🎀 It impacts profitability
I like encouraging people to make a budget line item for strategic giving, that way it doesn't feel like a bottom line buster, 💸 but rather a marketing invoice you're paying through product (or monetarily if that fits your strategy).
- 🎀 Can leave you open to bad reviews
- 🎀 Loss of potential future opportunities
🎁 Creating a Strategic Giving Goal.
A wo-man with a plan! Create a giving goal, then create a marketing campaign around it. Do you want to use strategic giving to increase your social media impressions? Partner with a cause that's active on socials. Want to support a cause you vibe with? Find a charity that directly impacts that and partner there.
- 🎀 Do you want awareness? Social media?
- 🎀 Support a cause?
- 🎀 Last-minute opps
Using community groups to find quick strategic giving opportunities is a really neat (but also a lot of work) method of giving. Finding someone who dropped a cake and posted about it = offer them free cookies. Community groups are an amazing way to reach hyper-local customers.
- 🎀 Do you want to reach a new audience?
- 🎀 How many opportunities are you willing to take?
- 🎀 Maybe it’s just not the right fit for you right now.
🎁 How to turn down opportunities
You need to have a boundary around giving because it can get out of hand and burn the baker out real quick.
