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 🍪
260. Baking it Down - Business Weeding
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🌱 Business Weeding - Stop bad behavior before it starts.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 260 - Business Weeding, we wanted to talk about small behavioral problems that, when left to grow and get deeper roots, become big problems. Yes, Heather was weeding, and this is all she could think about.
What happens is ya get started selling cookies, likely because it was a hobby, and randomly someone says, "Oh, can I place an order?!" Right here - it's right here when you need to start weeding out your own bad behavior.
Trust me - we write from beyond the trenches dug in months and years of bad behavior reinforcement. Pruning the weeds when they're small will make for a business you're happy to tend to.
🪴 Social Media Commenting
You get in turf wars in local groups, go mud slinging in topic-focused groups, and laugh react at anyone you disagree with? Grab those pruning shears, because that's a bad behavior you've gotta cut off before it strangles your lead garden.
In all seriousness, with the appreciation of Facebook groups through Meta, admins are given more and more transparency regarding group members, and as the search features get more dialed in with Facebook groups going public (versus private), your social search history will become more clear and present - a clear and present danger if you're used to rolling in the social mud.
This is where a few of you will dig in your heels - specifically with political rhetoric. Listen - your cause would rather you donate the money from your cookie sales than have you win an argument in the comment section on an obscure thread in an obscure group on Facebook (pro-tip: you won't convince anyone of anything on Facebook).
🪴 Mishandling Order Intake
When you're just getting started, there's no website, no forms, barely a Facebook page, and likely it's just your personal Instagram. This is par for the course - but allow us to speak from "The Great Beyond." Force people to place and order through a form - yes, even when you're just getting started (Google Forms is free). It's not if, it's when you forget an order when you don't take them through a single instake process like a form.
🪴️ Pricing to Make the Sale
This will always lead to hurt feelings down the road, so eradicate it from the root now. Pricing low to snag the order will lead to clients who gravitate towards you due to your lower prices. But as your skills increase, so must your prices, and so will your clients, right? RIGHT?? Wrong - once we taste of "on sale," we rarely believe it's worth more (check out the JCPenney case study for proof). Price appropriately to your costs. Your labor costs will be lower because your skill set is, but pricing to be the lowest to beat out the older, more seasoned competition? Listen - there's a reason they ain't cheap.
🪴️ Friends and Family Discount
Corrie is standing here with a shovel and a h-oe (not today, Zuck) telling you - DO NOT do friends and family the favor of undercharging without telling them this is a deal. What will happen is that they don't know your actual prices, and when you slap them down the road with sticker shock, they feel slighted. If you wanna do Auntie a solid, tell them they always get 15% off (or whatever you're comfortable with), that way your discount grows with your pricing versus a flat rate you may feel is unfair to you down the road of gainful experience.
👂 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 260 - Business Wedding.
