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 🍪
255. Baking it Down - Pre-Sales Bootcamp Recap
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
💲 Pre-Sales Recap - What we learned in the bootcamp.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 255 - Bootcamp Recap, we recapped the Bootcamp on Pre-Sales. No, this isn't a sales pitch, but the cool part about the bootcamps is the private Bootcamp Facebook group dedicated to that month's focus topic.
Since the Bootcamp group, well, boots everyone when the Bootcamp finishes, the people who join are 100% there to get their learnin' on. So the answers to the group polls and prompts can be pretty telling when it comes to the pre-sale (pre-order?) industry as a whole.
🪖 Pre-Sale or Pre-Order?
We asked "recruits" what they call a pre-sale to their clients. Outside of the baking industry, I'm not sure 'pre-sale' is a well-known term. Pre-order, however, has been widely adopted when it comes to product drops like merch. (Remember when I woke up at 6 AM to go to a Target in another state to snag the Diet Coke Owala drop??). Overwhelmingly, bakers agree - pre-order was used by 79% of bakers polled in the Bootcamp.
🪖 Pick-Up Days
Not all pick-up days are created equally, and there's the nuance of getting as close as you can to the holiday the pre-sale is centered around, while also making it an ideal day for your audience (and bakers... who wants to really be glued to your doorbell on a beautiful Saturday?).
We had two close calls, but Friday won at 44% of bakers choosing it as the optimal date for pre-sale pick-ups, followed by Saturdays at 38%. Interestingly, Thursdays came in third place, and Monday and Tuesday tied for last.
🪖 Repeat Pre-Seller
I found this one interesting - who wanted to register for the Bootcamp? Seasoned pros? Newbs trying to figure out how to plan it all? Turned out it was mostly bakers who had already hosted a presale - 80% of Bootcampers had replied with "yes" when asked if they had hosted a pre-sale before.
And I think I know why. Often, pre-sales can't be a "one hit wonder," so bakers try it, it flops, they swear off pre-sales ever again, but that thought in the back of their mind that they're leaving good money on the table lingers.
Pre-sales are unique and require repetition to train our audience to understand how they work. Such would be that the first few pre-sales would be flops - your audience is still in the learning phase.
🪖 Schooled on Pre-Sales
The next big pre-sale theme is school-related. May and June are chock-full of teacher appreciation, graduation, the last day of school, etc. So, which did bakers say gets the most bang for their pre-sale buck? Teacher Appreciation was voted by 72% of bakers as the best seller when it comes to school-related pre-sales.
In this podcast, we also read "enlistees" one tip they'd give about pre-sales, along with having Corrie recap what went right and wrong in her own Easter Pre-Sale Pickup this past Friday.
👂 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 255 - Pre-Sales Recap.
