159. Baking it Down - Excuse my Excuses

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🥲 Excuse my Excuses - Don't cry unless you've tried (everything).

This week's podcast is a deep dive into a post I made in the group earlier this week - the post regarding "woe is me" threads saying the cookie industry is done, pack it up kids, you don't gotta go home, but you can stay... in this kitchen.

You see - that defeatist mentality ain't go no business being in a business-centric group. It will limit your sales and, over time, cause you to quit. Quite literally the opposite of marketing and growth mindsets. 

😭 "But I've tried (and cried) everything! It's not working anymore!"

Have you, though? Have you actually tried everything? Because there are now 159 Baking it Down podcast episodes covering 159 marketing tactics. And I'll wager you aint' tried even a third of the stuff we talked about. That's what today's podcast is about.

And even if you did - 🥤 have you ever wondered why Coca-Cola, founded in 1886, ✨still✨ buys ad space at the beginning of every movie? 🎥 They've been at this for 138 years and they still keep hittin' the marketing campaign trail! It's because consistency - over long periods of time - produces results.

Marketing ain't a one-and-done. If it was, I'd be out of a job and 🤑 cookiers would be millionaires. It's repeated effort for a really, really long time.  Let's jump into the post.

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I often see people complain about their local markets in these groups.

• 🧈 The price of butter is too high,
• 📉 Competitor prices are too low,
• 👥 The market is saturated,
• 🚫 The market doesn't want cookies,
• 🎟️ Too many people teaching cookie classes,
• 🪑 Too few people taking cookie classes,
• 👎 The competition isn't as good as you,
• 😭 The competition has more tag-happy friends than you.

You get the point.

👀 There are 45,000 people here - so I get the honor of reading many contradicting opinions on why sales aren't where we expected them to be.

Teeechnically... 🙅 you can only write "the cookie game is done" if you attempted every marketing tactic covered in this group. Then, and only then, can you say with certainty that the party is truly over.

🏃 I mean - how can you say you won't win a foot race if you never ran the race in the first place? Same applies to marketing. Can't say you can't sell anything if you didn't try everything in your power to sell it.

You can't say, "No one buys my cookies" if you never told absolutely everyone that you were selling cookies, right?

So allow me to ask... have you:

• ✅ Attempted to market to commercial businesses by dropping by with a logo cookie.
• ✅ Worked on growing your review profile by getting new reviews and responding to bad reviews in a way that will increase sales.
• ✅ Focused on upping your curb appeal for in-person pickups.
• ✅ Implemented copy formulas to increase conversion rates - AIDA, PAS, 4 C's, 4 U's, Before After Bridge.
• ✅ Implented "customer delight" methods to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
• ✅ Used better adjectives to make your products and pitches sound more appealing in social media posts and emails.
• ✅ Streamlined your branding for easier brand recognition across all print and digital profiles.
• ✅ Run g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s to engage your page / group audience frequently.
• ✅ Focused on adding value to local community groups each week.
• ✅ Created your own local community group to better facilitate a value-added hyper-local community group.
• ✅ Consistently posted to your social media every week for an entire year.
• ✅ Created an email list on a newsletter sender (Mailchimp, Flodesk, Constant