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 🍪
275. Baking it Down - Big Shoes Battle
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👟 Big Shoes Battle - How to compete with the big bakers.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 275 - Big Shoes Battle, we're back on our beginner baker series, and good news - even if you're new and it feels like you're takin' on the Big Dog Bakers who have been in the space for 5+ years, you can still play ball.
Here are five ways that being the underdog actually gives you the home-field advantage over more established bakers regarding your marketing approach.
👟 Followers Don't Matter.
Ten years ago, we wouldn't be able to tell you that followers were just a made-up number that doesn't affect marketing. Today we can tell you that. Yes, having a base of followers adds social proof and signals to a customer that you aren't a made-up cookie business out to steal their money and disappear into the abyss.
But you can now reach far more than your follower count - it's the plus side of algorithm-based reach. So even if you have 100 followers, a quality post that reaches the right audience has the potential to reach thousands of would-be clients. Post in a local Facebook group, and their followers are now wide open to your reach - and you didn't even have to make and run a Facebook group.
The potential to reach more in your audience has never been higher - and you don't have to get 1,000,000 followers to do it (remember when you could only reach the people who followed your page??).
👟 No group tags? Tag yourself.
If you're new to baking, you're not going to get as many tags as a more established baker with a long-term network of referrals and word-of-mouth. But guess what? You can be your biggest fan right out of the gate. Put the blinders on if seeing the other baker tags affects you negatively, but always tag yourself. And be honest about it too. None of this, "I hear [myself] is a really great baker!"
Approach it this way: "Hey Mary! I'm Corrie with Mixing Bowl Cookies [tag page], and I'd love to have the chance to work with you on your event! Here's a picture of a set I've done similar to what you're looking for. If you want to work together on this, here's how to get started [how they place an order with you]." Don't forget to include a picture, emojis, and line breaks.
👟 No email list? Start now.
A small but engaged email list = better than a large email list that the seasoned baker has forgotten to email for over a year (55% of bakers said they haven't emailed their audience in the last 12 months).
A quick win for a new baker - starting (and staying consistent with) an email list. Email is the final frontier of chronological order, and even if the clients don't open it (20% is the industry open rate standard), they still saw your brand and know you exist for their next order.
👟 No incoming orders? Make content.
That big baker who is fully booked doesn't have time to make content that could go viral, get shared, or reach that next order from someone who otherwise wouldn't know you exist. While they're busy baking it up in the kitchen, you get busy recording content. In the world of Reels, you can quickly grow an audience just from a few decently performing vertical videos.
Stream this week's pod to see our solution for bakers who are so new, they have no reviews. Yep - you can take the big dogs on here too!
👂 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 275 - Big Shoe Battles.
