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 🍪
277. Baking it Down - First Timer Follies
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
🤡 First Timer Follies - When you’re new and need orders.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 277 - First Timer Follies, we're wrapping up our New Baker's series, talking about first-timer mistakes you don't have to repeat if you snag yesterday's episode.
When you're new to any industry, it's easy not to know what ya don't know - and that's what this beginner podcast series is for: to help new bakers miss the missteps when just getting started, saving them time (and tears).
You can reference the series here:
- 🎧 277. Baking it Down - First Timer Follies
- 🎧 276. Baking it Down - How To Turn Down Orders When You Need Orders
- 🎧 275. Baking it Down - Big Shoes Battle
- 🎧 274. Baking it Down - Allow Us to be Your Personal Yodas
- 🎧 273. Baking it Down - Content Cookies for Beginner Bakers
- 🎧 270. Baking it Down - The Right Foot when Getting Started
- 🎧 269. Baking it Down - Sugar Cookies as a Side Hustle
🙅♀️ Don't overbuy cookie cutters
Corrie said a big impulse when you're first out of the gate is to snag each and every cookie cutter, dreaming of a certain style of baker you want to be, typically centered around a specific aesthetic.
But it's your skill set and your client base that determines which cutters you'll find yourself reaching for most. So start with purchasing simple shapes and plaques - these are versatile shapes you can use again and again.
Oftentimes, bakers will end up never even touching the very cutters they spent their early dollars on - and that's a profit problem. Take notes from the folly of your elders - not every cutter is worth the squeeze when you're just getting started!
🙅♀️ Don't jump on trends
Trends are as awesome as they are a risk - you can make quick money, sure, but you can also be stuck with an endless supply of Labubu boxes or Target crates. Let the more established bakers snag those trendy sales - they have the audience for it and the skills for quick turnaround (before the trend dries up). Focus on popular (repeating) holidays at Christmas or Halloween that are guaranteed to come back in style year after year (and use up that extra pumpkin-shaped packaging).
🙅♀️ Have an order intake form in place
With Google Forms being free and Jotform being essentially free for new bakers, you don't have to learn that you need an intake process in place by missing an order or spelling a name wrong.
Take a lesson from every baker before you and make a form that gets all orders coming in to one place rather than managing texts, emails, Facebook messages, and Instagram DMs (it's only a matter of time before you miss some important detail that will force a refund or catch a bad review).
🙅♀️ Don't offer everything
You may feel like offering everything everyone wants will get you every dollar they have. Fun surprise - it actually works the opposite. Analysis paralysis + loss aversion + expiring ingredients = offering everything when you're just getting started can be bad news for profit margins.
Start with the basics, master that, grow the customer base, then add the cake pops + bronuts + sourdough, etc. When you're just getting your sealegs under ya, it's not the time to be adding more boats to the fleet.
👂 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 277 - First Timer Follies.
