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 🍪
251. Baking it Down - Posting Do and Donuts
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
🍩 Posting Do’s & Do-nots - Coming up with a social strategy.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 251 - Posting Dos and Donuts, the twin2 (sorry for the audio issues on this episode, still figuring out remote podcasts 😭) wanted to talk about posting strategy. If it were as easy as "post every day and you'll be a billionaire," well, you wouldn't be hearing from me right now; I'd be too busy posting once a day (as I'm sure you would, too).
But alas - posting and getting reach involves strategy - a formulated plan to reach our audience and cut through the noise of every other business attempting to snag their attention and hog their feeds.
📝 Do: Post frequently
In today's podcast, Corrie said, "Post every day," as in that's the goal, but it can't be just posting whatever, whenever. It's gotta be quality content as frequently as you can manage it. Does that mean if you don't post daily, you get a big giant F in marketing? No - that means you get a giant H because you're H-uman.
It's estimated that every day, 300 million pieces of content are posted to Facebook - and we need to cut through all of that with our cookie posts. So how do you compete in a flooded feed? You get creative, but you also stay consistent.
🍩 Do-not: Post just to post
Content is queen, sure - but quality content will reign supreme. If you posted a cookie set every day, you'd be posting consistently, yes - but your reach will decrease over time. Why? 🥱 It's boring. Just a picture of a decorating cookie and a boring caption? It can only do so much. The algos won't reward you with reach because your content doesn't compel people to stay on the platform.
💡 Remember - content that intrigues, captivates, creates curiosity keeps people on their platforms. If you keep people on their platforms long enough for them to serve an ad, they'll reward you with more reach.
Corrie has been pinging her "personal" content bucket. Her Q1 strategy was to see if creating more relationship-centered content would increase her reach. And in February, she saw a 39% increase in reach - and a double bonus, 71% of those were non-followers.
📝 Do: Check insights
Your insights (metrics) provided by my social media platforms will help you guide your strategy. Some things your audience will love, some will be only viewed by crickets. 📊 Corrie made an Excel spreadsheet tracking each piece of content she posted in February, the reach, and the engagement. From there, she's able to dial in that strategy for March. She can cut what didn't land, and she can double down on what got more of a response.
And that's how you build a strategy that's ever-shifting.
🍩 Do-not: Talk at your audience
Social media is a conversation. 🤝 That's why end users are able to like, comment, stitch, and share - because social platforms know that the more people can converse, the longer they stay on the platform, and yep - the more ads they can be served. Remember that relationship, right?
🗣️ By asking a question or making a joke or posting interesting content, you're joining the conversation. When you say, "Buy from me, buy from me, buy from me," there's no conversation happening there. "Do you want to buy from me?" Still not it. What about posting a set of cat-themed cookies and asking people to comment with a photo of their cats in the comments?
Guess what - 🐱 they'll comment a pic of their lil orange Garfield and tell you all about how adorable it is when he scratches the seats up. That's a conversation!
