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 🍪
273. Baking it Down - Content Cookies for Beginner Bakers
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📹 Content Cookies - For the beginner cookier.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 273 - Content Cookies for the Beginner Baker, we acknowledge there's an issue between when a baker gets started selling and the amount of content they have... or, well, don't have.
A lot of the content that bakers post comes from the orders they take, and they get orders from the content they post. So when you're new to selling, you've got a bit of the 'chicken or the egg' going on - how can you make content if you don't have orders?
There are a few strategic approaches that won't have you burning through (baking up?) your margins when money is at the tightest point for any startup - at the beginning.
📹 Point #1 - Segment the Cookies in a Set
One single cookie set order of a dozen cookies featuring 4 different designs can get you a lot more content than that one photo you posted. Use the zoom and crop features! Corrie will turn a "jungle birthday" into a single cookie for National Lion's Day (hey - did you know Monday was National Lion's Day?).
Stage it multiple ways and take pictures of each design. Have a "pyramid" setup and then do an isolation setup on a white backdrop. The more you make your cookies work for you in the beginning, the less you'll have to stress when it comes to "what should I post today?"
📹 Trends don't require experience
Most popular trends on TikTok and Instagram don't require being an expert decorator as much as they require you figuring out what's trending and posting before the trend dies down. TikTok even has its own trend tracker.
August's "I never told you this, but" trend could easily be done with your business partner or spouse - throw on an apron and make it bakery-themed, and there's a lot of potential there.
📹 Behind the scenes content
No one has better (butter?) behind-the-scenes content than a new baker with actual time to make decent B-roll featuring behind-the-scenes of starting a bakery. From finding a cake pop cart (all the rage these days) to figuring out a new type of floral piping strategy to setting up at your first farmer's market - it almost works in favor of the new baker.
Behind the scenes should be one content bucket you're constantly pinging with videos. Vertical video format will be your quick-win way to cut the line in front of more established bakers.
📹 Notta Cookies
Regardless, the new baker needs to get time in the proverbial saddle (er... apron), so practice, practice, practice. But instead of having to fire up the oven for cookies you'll pitch anyway, check out "notta cookies" - the original concept came from the creators of CookieCon, and it's literally a plastic practice cookie - that way you're only losing on the ingredients cost of royal icing while still being able to tackle new techniques. Heck - make the "notta cookie" practice into videos - hey, did we mention make more videos?
Listen to the strategies behind our last time - turning practice into give-a-w-a-y-s to increase brand awareness, grow reviews, and get real-life taste testers so you're "wasted ingredients cost" actually hits your marketing budget.
👂 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 273 - Content Cookies for the Beginner Baker.
