Sugar Cookie Marketing

?? Charging your worth is haaaaard. How do you charge enough to make this worth it without charging too much where no one wants to buy!? "It feels like I'm chargin' too much" or "This just ain't worth it" is often something that runs through baker's minds as they try and quote and make it worth it for all involved. You’re in luck- pricing is a math problem, not a feeling. You have your fixed costs, your overhead costs, your labor and your profits. Fixed costs are things like boxes and ingredients. While they can fluctuate in pricing (lookin' at you, eggs), they are typically pretty standard across the board from year to year. You might be able to score butter at a discount one month or you use a coupon for the Vendy Blendy and get your packaging for a great deal. Your overhead are things like website hosting, insurance and any licenses you obtain yearly. Run Facebook Ads from time to time? That would fit right in here into your overhead. Overhead costs are often referred to as "behind-the-scenes" costs that you can't visually see like a barkery box but that are still needed to run a successful bakery business. Your labor (probably the biggest number behind your pricing) is what you make as an employee of your business. This is what you take home. And no, your business profits and your hourly rate aren't the same thing. Imagine being an employee working at a pizza place and the pizza place owner comes to you and asks you for $100 for pizza boxes because he ran out of cash. You'd probably throw your pizza apron on the ground and call it quits. Same for your bakery. You can't borrow from yourself to fund your business. Yes yes, start-up costs are a thing, but eventually the business has to sustain itself *and* it's number one employee, you. If you keep borrowing from one to pay the other, your business will eventually close down or you'll eventually quit. Your profits are what your business makes so it can continue to run on its own without taking money from your labor to make it run. Small businesses tend to aim for a 10%-20% net profit margin and it's a safe number for you to aim for as well. You'll find some of your offerings have higher profit margins (hello cookie classes) and some will have lower (sad face for intricate custom orders) but aiming for an overall is the goal. The next part in this math problem is marketing to the *right* audience. Folks will see your pricing and balk at it- that’s okay, they aren’t your client. Thank them for the inquiry and move on because we are on a mission to find the right clients for your luxury business. Your ideal client values your skills, packaging, processes and product. We are speaking to high-end folks who are willing to pay for a high-end product. Your photography stops their scrolls. Your formulated captions grabs their attention and your well-crafted website converts them into sales.

Posting and ?? *crickets* ??? You're not alone in wanting more from your hard work and social media posts. Many business owners are seeing decreased reach which can make posting feel like wasted time. So, what do? Meta Insights are one of my favorite tools in my marketing tool chest because it helps me understand my audience and utilize them the most. 1. Check active times Listen, in a world of low reach, makin' sure you post during the times your current followers are most active can help get more eyes on the prize and give your post the chance to be seen more and *if we use the right copy* give it more of a chance to get interacted with. My most active day of the week for my followers is Thursdays so I need to incorporate that into my strategy and make sure I show up on that day with a good post and even better copy. 2. Check what media type your audience responds to As you can see in the photo, my audience loves a good photo. If I dig into my insights, it actually tells me I get more engagement with single photo posts vs posts with multiple photos in it. This will help me create a better posting strategy that'll help guide me in creating content that actually resonates with my audience vs posting whatever and hopin' for the best. 3. Check out "Top Content" and create a strategy based on that feedback My "Content Library", as Meta calls it, helps me see what photo and copy combo works best for my audience. In the last 28 days, the posts that performed the best was my "New Product Alert". This makes sense because I rarely create a new product in my lineup but also tells me maybe I should consider it more since my audience responded very well to it. My second best performer was an opinion based piece where I ask my audience what they think about a situation that happened online. When the answer isn't just "yes or no", it causes my audience to engage more and listen, everyone's got them an opinion so if I can use it to my benefit- why not! One thing is for sure is never get too comfy in your posting strategy. Switching it up can keep your audience alert and engaged. Pulling from different content buckets can keep your page from going stale and that engagement from falling off.

Spammers and Scammers are running rampant out there on social media and they have their eyes set on your logins. So what can you do to protect yourself and your business assets? Heres a few! A few things that are best to keep in mind here: -Meta (Facebook’s corporate name) will never contact you regarding your account via DMs, comments, or Messenger. Any official account action is always received by email, and email only. -If you receive an email like this, look at the “from” field to make sure it is coming from somebody actually at meta.com or facebook.com, I see a lot of scams that look very official, but the “from” field lists a Gmail.com or outlook.com address. You can instantly mark those as spam. -If the email has a link, hover over it with your mouse WITHOUT CLICKING. It’ll show you where it actually goes. If the link goes anywhere besides meta.com or Facebook.com, it’s a scam, and you should mark it as spam. There’s an awful lot of social engineering attempts going on out there, and I see them daily. One thing they are getting good at is getting better with their verbiage, tactics and targeting.

Keep an eye out for notifications like this! They aren’t real but they are trying to take your logins. At the end of the day, it’s a fake page and a blue profile photo and nothing more. Meta won’t message or comment to reach out, they’ll send you an email to the one tied to your account if they need to reach you!

?? TikTok Ban Update: Jan 18th ?? TikTok has just released that the app will now be going dark tomorrow, January 19th. So save your videos today, download your saved content, tell your audience where to find you. Link your Instagram in your bio to make it easier.

?? New Instagram update: no more squares ?? If you look at these two photos, you’ll see the same content but the formatting is different- first photo as longer photos and the second is the square Apparently the roll out will happen slowly and you’ll see more elongated photos on your profiles and the old squares are out. Keep this in mind as you edit graphics and photos for pre-sales and popups! Keep important information away from boarders.

So the TikTok ban is tickin' towards us with Sunday being the final day the app will be accessible (in some ways, still up in the air) to us. Updates from yesterday is that a Senator from Massachusetts tried to pass a bill that would extend TikTok for 270 days and it was shot down immediately by another Senator from Arkansas which means it's dead in the water as it needed to be unanimous to go into effect. Elon Musk and Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary tried separately to purchases TikTok with ByteDance resisting both offers and staying true to their words that they will not sell any portion of the app. TikTok users are flocking to an app called RedNote which is also Chinese owned and the Chinese on the app are asking Americans to *not* join the app as China is planning on takin' the app and separating out the servers which will block the Chinese people from accessing the already limited information they can get. Last but not least and I know you guys won't make this political as this is just an update post, Shou is planning to attend the inauguration on the 20th in hopes to show the TikTok user base that he won't be checking out with the app on the 19th. That's all I got for you right now!

If you've followed the news the last few weeks, you know that the fate of TikTok comes down to the Supreme Court's ruling and January 19th. Whether you use TikTok or not, this is a great reminder that you don't own anything when it comes to online marketing. From platforms being banned to accounts being blocked to being delisted on Google, you can never get too comfortable and put too much focus on any one platform. It's okay to put your focus towards your money maker but puttin' all those bakin' eggs in one online basket can be devastating if that basket were to be taken' from you. Things to start workin' on now that you can own are things like email addresses and phone numbers. Those are things you can physically own (heck, print them off if you're worried) and can allow you to stay in contact with customers even in the event your platform is taken away. Many content creators will be comin' back to Meta platforms because of the creator rewards being already in place and established as opposed to new platforms poppin' up with the shadow of the ban so a tip would be to start strategizing your marketing strategy with the idea that more people may become engaged with the content on this platform.

Neptune, Flip, Bluesky- all names being tossed around for the TikTok ban and folks debating on where to go next. The issue? Too many options, not enough financial backing. You see, Facebook acquired Instagram. Tiktok bought Musically. These big companies didn't start from the ground up. The issue with these new platforms popping up in the shadow of the ever looming TikTok ban is that they don't have the backing to interest users and investors. It's the chicken or the egg approach. Content creators want to get paid for their content they produce. Advertisers want enough content and views to pay for the content creators. This issue isn't new either. Vine, Periscope and Friendster didn't have enough to keep up with the big boys (Meta and Google aka YouTube) and now no longer exist. Folks will go to where they are compensated and advertisers will stay where the users are. Could these new apps take off? Sure- anything is possible. Will they? That remains to be seen.

?? TikTok Ban Update ?? The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments today over whether or not this TikTok ban is violating people's rights to free speech or not BUT one thing is for sure- ByteDance (the Chinese company who owns TikTok) is not selling. This whole case rests largely on the fact that TikTok could stay around if ByteDance would sell of their portion to a US based company so that the data tracked from this app isn't in the hands of foreign leaders. ByteDance has started the proceedings stating that they will not be selling anything at all to anyone. On January 19th, depending on how this court case goes, TikTok will be removed from the app stores but the app will still remain on your phone. Unfortunately, there will be no more updates pushed to it and over time, the bugs and glitches will take over and it won't work anymore. For now, today, download your content so you can have it regardless if you choose to go to another app or not. At least it'll be yours to decide vs lost in space and time.