Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 260 - Business Weeding, we wanted to talk about small behavioral problems that, when left to grow and get deeper roots, become big problems. Yes, Heather was weeding, and this is all she could think about.

What happens is ya get started selling cookies, likely because it was a hobby, and randomly someone says, "Oh, can I place an order?!" Right here - it's right here when you need to start weeding out your own bad behavior.

Trust me - we write from beyond the trenches dug in months and years of bad behavior reinforcement. Pruning the weeds when they're small will make for a business you're happy to tend to.

🪴 Social Media Commenting 

You get in turf wars in local groups, go mud slinging in topic-focused groups, and laugh react at anyone you disagree with? Grab those pruning shears, because that's a bad behavior you've gotta cut off before it strangles your lead garden.

In all seriousness, with the appreciation of Facebook groups through Meta, admins are given more and more transparency regarding group members, and as the search features get more dialed in with Facebook groups going public (versus private), your social search history will become more clear and present - a clear and present danger if you're used to rolling in the social mud.

This is where a few of you will dig in your heels - specifically with political rhetoric. Listen - your cause would rather you donate the money from your cookie sales than have you win an argument in the comment section on an obscure thread in an obscure group on Facebook (pro-tip: you won't convince anyone of anything on Facebook).

🪴 Mishandling Order Intake

When you're just getting started, there's no website, no forms, barely a Facebook page, and likely it's just your personal Instagram. This is par for the course - but allow us to speak from "The Great Beyond." Force people to place and order through a form - yes, even when you're just getting started (Google Forms is free). It's not if, it's when you forget an order when you don't take them through a single instake process like a form.

🪴️ Pricing to Make the Sale

This will always lead to hurt feelings down the road, so eradicate it from the root now. Pricing low to snag the order will lead to clients who gravitate towards you due to your lower prices. But as your skills increase, so must your prices, and so will your clients, right? RIGHT?? Wrong - once we taste of "on sale," we rarely believe it's worth more (check out the JCPenney case study for proof). Price appropriately to your costs. Your labor costs will be lower because your skill set is, but pricing to be the lowest to beat out the older, more seasoned competition? Listen - there's a reason they ain't cheap. 

🪴️ Friends and Family Discount

Corrie is standing here with a shovel and a h-oe (not today, Zuck) telling you - DO NOT do friends and family the favor of undercharging without telling them this is a deal. What will happen is that they don't know your actual prices, and when you slap them down the road with sticker shock, they feel slighted. If you wanna do Auntie a solid, tell them they always get 15% off (or whatever you're comfortable with), that way your discount grows with your pricing versus a flat rate you may feel is unfair to you down the road of gainful experience. 

👂 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 260 - Business Wedding.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 259 - Posting Every Day, Corrie has been testing out a 30-day strategy to cut through the noise of crowded AI-spun feeds to see if she can get the algo to swing in her direction and show more of her business page posts to her target demographic.

In a world where anyone can get ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to whip up copy that conforms to copy frameworks, uses perfect punctuation, and the right dash of emojis with a clear CTA - how can you stand out? 

Corrie's placing all her chips (and posts) on red so her posts can get... well, read.

✍️ Content That Creates Engagement

In her strategy, she's posting every day, testing from a series of content buckets or pillars that hit a few different targets in order to reach her audience. One of those buckets includes talking directly to her page followers - asking for opinions, taking polls, and asking for advice. Basically, she's trying to create a back-and-forth conversation. This equals engagement. 

This is different than what most other business pages do - which is pretty much a constant string of "buy from me" sales posts. Don't worry - we'll add in the sale pitches in a minute. You'd be looking for 12 pieces of engaging content in a 30-day runtime following an 80/20 ratio.

✍️ Posting Content that Connects

People love people, and letting people in allows your audience to connect with your business on a deeper level. But if you're shy, there's still a way to connect with your audience! Use the Main Street May Cookie Collab as a great way to connect your business (cookies) with your local Main Street and watch your audience run to comment that they love the place you featured. 

If you were running this test for 30 days, 12 days should feature content that connects with your audience.

✍️ Posting Content that Converts

And finally, we're a business, so we gotta sell. The 80/20 principle (Pareto Principle) is a great guide. If we're posting 30 days straight, 6 days need to feature pitches for your products - cookie classes, customs, a pop-up, a vendor market. 

You can still mix and match strategies here - we don't want to have a great engagement strategy, then smack them with a "BUY MY STUFF" suddenly. You could say, "Hey - I'm thinking about teaching this or that cookie class kit next week, which set would you like to see me teach?"

Strategies are different approaches to marketing and business - and they can run in long and short durations. If you feel stagnant in your posting strategy, this 30-day daily posting strategy can really give your page a solid dose of AI-detox defibrillation. 

👂 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 259 - Posting Every Day.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 258 - Speaking For Your Clients, Not As, we focus on bakers' tendency to hyper-focus on their own experience and apply it to their clients.

Except... we're not our clients.

🥣 We're not our clients so much so that we don't buy sugar cookies. We're so cheap, we figured out how to make them instead! 🧠 So it doesn't make a ton of sense to apply your method of thinking to your client's method of speaking. 

⛔🗣️ Stop speaking for your clients. Start speaking as your clients. Speaking for your clients can derail your business in a few different ways, but today we've focused on five. 

🗣️ Wallet-Watching

🧠  Wallet-watching is thinking your customer won’t pay your prices because you wouldn’t pay them. Of course, you wouldn't pay them; you quite literally learned how to bake sugar cookies, so you didn't have to pay someone else.

We speculate that "client speaking" thoughts come from a fear of rejection and a baker's attempt to get ahead of it. "If I lower my price, they won't say I'm too expensive and not worth the money."  

In reality, the client came to you - they're interested in finding a way you can work with them and their budget. You and the client aren't the bad guys - the budget is! Now you two get to find a way to make it all work.

🗣️ Boredom-Betting

🧠  Boredom-betting is adding too many things to your menu because you THINK your customers will get bored with your best sellers. We often call this analysis paralysis, or basically adding so many options that our lizard brains think, "Oh man, what if I pick the wrong one? I won't buy anything at all." 

🗣️  Social Sabotage

We see this one pop up every cookie collab. "I'm not on Instagram because I don't make sales there." You're thinking for your customers when you skip out on a social media platform because you don't find yourself buying on it. You're thinking as your customers when you realize not everyone uses social media the same way you do.

If you get a minute, listen to this week's podcast, Episode 258 - we have two more examples of thinking for versus thinking as your clients.

👂 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 258 - Speaking For Your Clients, Not As.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 257 - What Popped Off at What's Popping Con, Corrie and I just got back from this week's second-ever 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣 What's Popping Con - a cake pop convention by Daisy Makes (also a beloved Baking it Down podcast sponsor).

Last year, 👥 we'd talked about marketing in community groups, so this year, "the twins" wanted to level up that concept to build a social media strategy brick by brick from the ground up.

🙏 Counter to the "spray and pray" method of posting whatever and hoping for the best, 🎯 a content strategy starts with a S-M-A-R-T goal, then uses that goal to figure out which of Meta's Insights Dashboard metrics you'll measure your results with.

Our "cake-study" Cake Pop Kelly decides her SMART goal is to:

• 👉 Generate $500 more dollars (specific) 
• 👉 In May 2026 (time-bound) 
• 👉 Than she did in May 2025 (attainable) 
• 👉 Using a Vendor Expo as well as custom orders 
• 👉 (she'd need to sell 100 cake pops at $5/ea or acquire 7.5 custom orders at $66/dzn)

From there, she needs to build her content strategy based on her chosen metrics using content buckets intersected with media types. 

• 🔗 If you click on the webpage (https://www.sugarcookiemarketing.com/poppingagain), you can follow along with her plan step by step - even auditing Kelly's social media posts against her metrics.

👂 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 257 - What Popped Off at What's Popping Con.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 256 - Nextcuses, we wanted to talk about somethin' that crops up every month there's a Cookie Collab (Pipe a Park Collab is this Friday btw - oh, you won't be able to participate? Hold onto that thought.).

We get it - 🥺 life is lifing, the kids are screaming, the clients are screaming louder than the kids, the spouse is upset, the in-laws are coming over, and you're about .002 seconds from crying in a Target aisle. 😭

Your excuses = valid. None of those things is a lie. But all of those things are costing you business. 💪 But you can re-pattern your excuses to be more honest, and thus, more useful in understanding how you and your business work together.

✨ The "Five-Minute Rule" 

Most excuses are born from the fear of how long or difficult a task will be. 

🖐️ Tell yourself you will do the task for only five minutes. So it's not, "I'll take the twins 8-hour bootcamp on in-person cookie classes," but instead it's, "I'll start watching the Bootcamp for just 5 minutes."

• ✅ Why it works: The hardest part of any task is the transition from "doing nothing" to "doing something." Once the seal is broken, the excuse of being "too tired" or "too busy" usually fades because you’ve already started. 

🏋🏽🔥💪🏼🎧 I do this with the gym (my most hated place on earth). "I'm allowed to just drive to the gym, walk in, and leave" becomes, "Okay, find - I'll do a few exercises." We're literally tricking our brains into being productive-ish. And productive-ish is better than production-less.

✨ Practice "If-Then" Planning 

Excuses thrive with obstacles. The minute that gym parking lot is too packed? 🏎️💨 Ya girl hitting the gas right back home. And while it feels good in that minute (trust me - there is no higher high), I still didn't get my exercise in, and it'll cost me my cortisol, good sleep, and a healthy body.

The solution - if-then approach to obstacles. "If the gym is packed, I'll go for a long walk." 📸 And "If I run out of time to record a Reel for Instagram, I'll post a photo instead."

• ✅  Formula: "If [Obstacle] happens, then I will [Action]."
• ✅  Example: "If I feel too tired to work on that set after dinner, then I will set a timer for 10 minutes and just do the easiest task on my list." 

✨ Rephrase Your Language

This is my favorite one (probably because I'm most guilty of it). Excuses are masked as "can't." "I can't do the collab, "I can't record that Reel," "I can't make a website because..."

This takes the power from you and puts it on the reason (whatever comes after the "because). It makes things appear out of your control. Switch to "don't" or "choose not to" to take that power.

• ❌ Instead of: "I can't do the Pipe a Park collab because I recovering."
• ✅ Try: "I am choosing not to participate in the Pipe a Park collab. I'm tired from a recent surgery, and I don't feel like it right now."

Why this works: Taking ownership of the choice you make helps you realize you are in control. If you don't like the way the "choice" feels, you are more likely to change the behavior. 🤔 You may think, "Well, I am recovering, but going for a walk might be a nice experience, and I have a frozen cookie I could thaw." 

In this podcast, we cover 2 more approaches to turn your excuses into next-cuses. Tune in to learn about "frictionless starts" and "pay-off audits." 

👂 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 256 - Nextcuses.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

✅✅✅ Good - Better - Best - A tiered pricing strategy.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 254 - Good Better Best, we explore the Good, Better, Best (GBB) strategy for pricing tiers - the magic being "good" is where it's at.

Forgive the lateness of today's Onesday Wednesday... however *checks the clock* - it would seem we've still made the deadline (sorry, had to get today's Bootcamp on Pre-Sales launched).

Not all strategies are created equal, and not all strategies will fit your sales approach. I like to compare strategies to a blanket that lies on top of your sales. Find the blanket that's most comfortable for your business approach.

Today's blanket = tiered pricing. Specifically, a 3-tier pricing structure designed to drive buyers to the middle tier - the better tier.

Benefits of the Good Better Best strategy? It reduces decision fatigue by limiting options to three clear choices, helping customers feel like they are getting a great deal without the baker overextending their time or resources - what baker wants to get burnt out?!

And for the baker? Your orders are the ones you want to take, while still making space for the lower budgets and still being open to the budget busters (hey, we can wipe our tiers with hundred-dollar bills, right?).

This pricing approach enhances what your clients 🧠 perceive as a good value, especially when you're specific with the better and best tier options. People can see what they are getting (or what they aren't) and justify the higher tier because they can see the difference, but not opt for the highest tier, feeling like they saved some money. 

🎯 The goal = move them into the middle tier.

This approach to pricing maximizes your audience, too - 🏆🏆🏆 another win-win-win of the GBB. You can now reach people at different price points that you wouldn't normally reach when they have submitted a quote before knowing the price. The cheaper budgets fall in the "good" tier, the ideal clients snag the "better" pricing, and the clients who are gonna be extra actually pay extra.

The key is to price your Good Tier in an unappealing way - the price is appealing, but the options within the tier make the client think, "Eh, I'm not sure that's what I want exactly." Corrie says, "Think 2 designs, 3 colors, less than a dozen cookies." We basically want the good tier to be the fall guy.

Your Better Tier is your Magic Mike. Within this tier, we've got 6 colors, 4 designs, 5 names on cookies, 2 dozen cookies (made-up numbers, but you get the point). This tier will look like most of the orders you're already taking currently.

Your BEST Tier will be over the top - golds, metallics, lettering, endless customization... You get the point. And price like you get three numbers before the decimal point. Make the Best Tier feel slightly outta touch with reality - we don't want people opting for this tier first.

This strategy marries price anchoring, popcorn pricing, customer segmentation, and "the compromise effect" to create a really powerful three-in-one sales pitch. Consider whether tiered pricing is a good fit for your bakery this week.

👂 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 254 - Good Better Best.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 253 - SWOT Your Way to Success, I asked on the Sugar Cookie Marketing Facebook Page how Easter sales were so far (🐰 Easter falls almost two weeks earlier this year than it did in 2025). 

And the answers were all over the place - from being completely sold out to selling out of nothing. So what gives? 📍 Is location that big of a factor between selling out and selling a big fat egg (🐣 Easter puns)? 

Likely no - while it is a factor, conducting a SWOT analysis will give us a better answer as to what's working for you specifically and what needs to be buried in the backyard grass (🌱🥚 forced Easter puns).

The goal of SWOT analysis is to establish what's working, what's working against you, where there's room for growth, and what to watch out for. SWOT is an acronym that stands for:

• 💪 Strengths - What the business does better than anyone else. 
• 💪 Weaknesses - Areas where the business could improve or lacks resources. 
• 💪 Opportunities - External chances to grow or find a new market. 
• 💪 Threats - External factors that could cause trouble. 

In this week's podcast, ✝️ we run Corrie's Easter Pre-sales through a SWOT Analysis to determine that the cookie she thought would sell the least because of its religious affiliation actually sold the most. 

A SWOT Analysis determined that next year, ✅ she should offer more religious cookies, ✅ more exciting designs, ✅ allow for more of a marketing runtime by 2 weeks, and ✅ cross-promote with a cookie class that's not so close to Easter (so she can sell more leading up to Easter).

Let's adapt a SWOT Analysis to cottage bakers. When you think of your strengths and weaknesses, those are things that fall within the home - so ❌ your aging equipment (weakness) or ✅️ your automation software (strength), while your opportunities and threats are things that fall outside of the home - so a ✅️ new farmer's market opening (opportunity) or ❌ increased gas prices affecting delivery costs (threat).

SWOT for Cottage Bakers:

• 👉 Strengths - Low overhead costs or a "secret" family recipe.
• 👉 Weaknesses - Limited oven space or being the lowest priced baker (burnout risk).
• 👉 Opportunities - A local farmers' market opening up or a trend in gluten-free treats.
• 👉 Threats - Rising flour prices or strict new county health labeling laws.

Now that we know what a SWOT analysis is and how to look at the four quadrants (S-W-O-T), we need to find an objective. 

For the example above, we were conducting a SWOT analysis on how Corrie can increase her pre-sales for Easter 2027. By keeping this analysis in a living Google sheet, she can reference her analysis, take notes, and write future suggestions to herself (🧠 because goodness only knows we won't remember what happened yesterday, let alone what happened 364 days ago).

• 💡 How can I increase my Easter Pre-sales next year?
• 💡 Could I quit my 9-5?
• 💡 Should I expand into a brick-and-mortar?
• 💡 Are my sales dropping month over month?

Having an objective tells us where to look and guides the analysis. Listen to this week's podcast to hear more about the TOWS matrix of developing three SMART goals from your SWOT analysis (holy acronyms, twins!) 

👂 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 253 - SWOT Your Way to Success.

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 252 - Piping Positioning, we wanted to talk about a buzzy marketing concept called "product positioning." Think of positioning as the mental real estate your bakery is renting in the heads of your customers.

Here's the catch - 🫵 you don't control what they think about you, but rather all the pieces of marketing create an experience they recall when they hear your name. Let me explain.

Having recently moved, I've been targeted in a half dozen ads about anything and everything home goods, but one brand keeps rising to the top - of both feeds and word-of-mouth.

Quince is an up-and-coming household brand that positions itself as "luxury and quality for less," 💸💸💸💸 going as far as to directly compare their prices against popular brands like West Elm, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma (⚖️ there's a lawsuit about this, actually).

How do they do the same thing at the same quality, but for less? Their approach of "radical transparency" explains it just about everywhere on their website. They source the same materials from the same factories as the higher-priced brands, and then cut out the middleman by selling directly from their website to consumers.

Other examples of brands that have done a great job at positioning - try guessing these before you peek (some may be location dependent):

• 🧠 Safe Cars = Volvo
• 🧠 Customer Service Chicken = Chick-Fil-A
• 🧠 Everyday products at a lower cost = Walmart
• 🧠 Quick Oil Changes = Jiffy Lube
• 🧠 Judge-free Gym = Planet Fitness
• 🧠 Gas with Great Convenience Store = Sheetz
• 🧠 Quick Burgers = McDonald's 
• 🧠 Quality Groceries = Wegmans / Whole Foods 
• 🧠 Streaming Service = Netflix 
• 🧠 Best Dating App = Hinge 
• 🧠 Social Media = Facebook

What made us all think of mostly the same brands? That's positioning. If I said "really high-quality burger," you likely wouldn't think of McDonald's, right?

“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” - Jack Trout 

Positioning can take multiple forms and varies depending on who you're targeting (Volvo positions both as safe and as luxurious, depending on who their target market is for the vehicle). Price-based is the route Quince

🏷️ Price-based positioning is the route Quince is taking, and while we often tell bakers not to compete on price, you can position on price depending on your targets. For example, we're not the most expensive cookie class instructors, so we could compete there if we wanted, without touching our margins at all. 

Quality and premium positioning you see with brands like ⌚ Rolex or Apple - brands you know won't be cheap, but that's almost why you want them in the first place.

Application / Use-case positioning is a brand that comes to mind when you need to solve a specific problem. Which app would you use for online meetings? Zoom, right? What do you reach for when your nose is running? Kleenex? And then there's the funny backstory to Vecro (a brand so positioned that it's replaced its product name - hook and loop - with its brand). 

Take the concept of positioning into your week and see which brands have rented your mental landscape. The positioning formula is this:

• For [Target Audience], [Brand Name] is the [Category] that [Point of Differentiation] because [Reason to Believe].

Send us Fan Mail

🍩 Posting Do’s & Do-nots - Coming up with a social strategy.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 251 - Posting Dos and Donuts, the twin2 (sorry for the audio issues on this episode, still figuring out remote podcasts 😭) wanted to talk about posting strategy. If it were as easy as "post every day and you'll be a billionaire," well, you wouldn't be hearing from me right now; I'd be too busy posting once a day (as I'm sure you would, too).

But alas - posting and getting reach involves strategy - a formulated plan to reach our audience and cut through the noise of every other business attempting to snag their attention and hog their feeds.

 
📝 Do: Post frequently

In today's podcast, Corrie said, "Post every day," as in that's the goal, but it can't be just posting whatever, whenever. It's gotta be quality content as frequently as you can manage it. Does that mean if you don't post daily, you get a big giant F in marketing? No - that means you get a giant H because you're H-uman.

It's estimated that every day, 300 million pieces of content are posted to Facebook - and we need to cut through all of that with our cookie posts. So how do you compete in a flooded feed? You get creative, but you also stay consistent.
 
🍩 Do-not: Post just to post

Content is queen, sure - but quality content will reign supreme. If you posted a cookie set every day, you'd be posting consistently, yes - but your reach will decrease over time. Why? 🥱 It's boring. Just a picture of a decorating cookie and a boring caption? It can only do so much. The algos won't reward you with reach because your content doesn't compel people to stay on the platform.

💡 Remember - content that intrigues, captivates, creates curiosity keeps people on their platforms. If you keep people on their platforms long enough for them to serve an ad, they'll reward you with more reach.

Corrie has been pinging her "personal" content bucket. Her Q1 strategy was to see if creating more relationship-centered content would increase her reach. And in February, she saw a 39% increase in reach - and a double bonus, 71% of those were non-followers.

📝 Do: Check insights

Your insights (metrics) provided by my social media platforms will help you guide your strategy. Some things your audience will love, some will be only viewed by crickets. 📊 Corrie made an Excel spreadsheet tracking each piece of content she posted in February, the reach, and the engagement. From there, she's able to dial in that strategy for March. She can cut what didn't land, and she can double down on what got more of a response.

And that's how you build a strategy that's ever-shifting.

🍩 Do-not: Talk at your audience

Social media is a conversation. 🤝 That's why end users are able to like, comment, stitch, and share - because social platforms know that the more people can converse, the longer they stay on the platform, and yep - the more ads they can be served. Remember that relationship, right?

🗣️ By asking a question or making a joke or posting interesting content, you're joining the conversation. When you say, "Buy from me, buy from me, buy from me," there's no conversation happening there. "Do you want to buy from me?" Still not it. What about posting a set of cat-themed cookies and asking people to comment with a photo of their cats in the comments?

Guess what - 🐱 they'll comment a pic of their lil orange Garfield and tell you all about how adorable it is when he scratches the seats up. That's a conversation!