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 🍪
210. Baking it Down - How to Sell in Community Groups
💸 Selling in Community Groups - Turn groups into lead gen powerhouses.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 210 - Selling in Community Groups, we are talking about the same topic we presented this past Tuesday at What's Popping Con (a convention for Cake Poppers). This content is all available on our website by clicking this button - it's a lot of info and free templates, so click here to snag that stuff while it's still posted.
If you're already thinking, "There are no community groups in my area," consider starting your own. In this course, we'll cover some of the group mechanics that can help you form the foundation of your own community groups. Community groups that are valuable resources can be massive lead gen opportunities for the group admins.
🧠 A group is only as good as its management team. High-quality groups require a lot of effort, but they pay out in dividends.
💸 Snag a Free Tracking Template!
We live and die by our spreadsheets - and using one to track community groups allows you to stay on top of specific group rules, posting times, post types, group size - you get the point. This free Google sheet is built out for community group management. Use the dropdown to categorize each aspect of your local community groups.
Way too often, users get banned from community groups for breaking the sales rules specifically. It's important to keep track of each group's sales policies so we're not permanently banned from selling there.
We're going to look for about 10 local community groups if possible, but we'll take what we can get. The more options you have, the more potential audience you can reach.
It's important as a seller to understand how groups can be run within Meta's group options and features as these can affect your posting abilities within groups.
⚠️ An important aspect of selling in a community group: following their rules. Take a minute to join the Example Facebook Group we're using for the rest of this lesson - you can join it by clicking here > answering the membership questions > agree to the group rules. Let's run through some common community group Q&As to help you better understand how to approach groups when making your sales posts.
🔗 Rules can be found for any group by adding /rules to the end of the community group's URL (example: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sugarcookiemarketing/rules).
💸 Group Profiles - How to Optimize
When you join a community group, you automatically create a group profile separate from your Facebook profile (although still connected). Think of your group profile as a version of you specifically made for that group. Optimizing these group profiles can help increase lead generation in your community groups. Each community group you join creates a unique group profile for that specific group.
You can customize:
- ✍️ Your profile intro (150 character limit)
- ✍️ The profile cover photo (1640x600 pixel sizing)
When other users click on your profile within that group, they are taken to your group profile. Admins can also use your group profile to see admin actions taken against you, your group activity, as well as your profile information. From there, they can also click to your personal Facebook profile.
Your group profile is only a part of your overall Facebook persona. Optimize your personal profile as well. You can tag a business page or insert a URL in your personal profile. You can update your cover photo to feature your latest bakes, and you can share content from your baking page to
