Considering opening a Cottage Baking Business but wondering if you’ll be successful in making sales? Or maybe you already have a business and you’re looking for more ways to grow your customer base. These are really common questions and challenges that most cottage bakers encounter. You may be a talented wizard in the kitchen, but marketing and the business side may not be your area of expertise. No worries, today I’m going to share several strategies that you can implement to get business booming!
Social Media
First, you’re going to want a social media presence. And no, you do not need a million followers. But you do need to have a presence and start building relationships in your community. Most start with a Facebook page for their cottage baking business. Instagram is helpful but gaining a large following on Instagram can be a SLOW process and it’s not local to your community. Hence, the reason I suggest starting a Facebook page and inviting all your Facebook friends. This should give you a start of a customer base and I encourage you to post, post, post! Look for ways to engage with your followers and share pictures of all your baked goods. This will get people’s wheels turning on what you’re capable of and potential events they have coming up.
I suggest picking one or two social media platforms and focus on those. Don’t try to manage ALL the different platforms; you won’t be able to keep up and build any platforms successfully if you’re spreading yourself too thin. Just like any business, it’s all about building and nurturing relationships, so make sure you are engaging with your followers!
Cottage Baking Business Marketing Strategies
Custom Orders
This is generally the first type of sales bakers consider. After all, you’re thinking “I’ve set up a business, hire me to make you goodies!” Custom orders are a huge part of business for a lot of cottage bakers! If this is something you’re interested in offering, I encourage you to consider the following in order to be successful.
- Make it known to your followers that you are available for custom order requests and your preferred method of contact to discuss a potential custom order.
- Post how much lead time is necessary so customers can plan accordingly. You may need several weeks or even months, depending on how busy you are.
- If you have established pricing, share that information for customer awareness.
- Regularly post pictures of all the orders you produce. This will provide inspiration to your customers and learn your skill level.
- Make sure you really assess if you’ll be available on a regular basis to support custom order requests. If your schedule only permits you to bake one weekend a month, you’re going to have to turn away a lot of customers which may hurt your growth. Just something to consider to ensure you can support your strategy for strong business growth!
Pre-Sales
Pre-sales are a cottage baking business marketing strategy that has really taken off in the last couple years and can be really successful in growing your business! In this strategy, you determine an offering, or offerings, that you advertise to your followers, and they can place an order with an agreed upon date of pickup or delivery. Pre-sales have become very popular around all the holidays, but you can offer pre-sales anytime! There are life celebrations all the time and you can even just create cute, fun offerings anytime!
Let’s run through a pre-sale holiday example. Say Easter is coming up in a month. You decide on a few different offerings; a sugar cookie set, some paint-your-own cookies and some cupcakes for Easter. You make samples, take great photography and promote that these are available for ordering with established days for pickups or deliveries.
There are definitely holidays that are huge sellers and some that are smaller, but you can create offerings any time, especially in between holidays. Here are some helpful tips to be successful in offering pre-sales.
- Plan ahead! About 6 weeks in advance, plan your designs, making sure to consider pricing and packaging.
- Make samples and take great photography to showcase your offerings.
- 5-6 weeks in advance, start posting some teasers on your social media, letting people know you have amazing offerings coming. Start building excitement and people will be waiting and watching!
- 3-4 weeks in advance, start promoting on your social media with photos, excitement, details on how they can place orders, dates they’ll be available and a deadline for ordering.
- Don’t stress if orders don’t roll in immediately. In my experience, you’ll get some orders right away; these are your planner customers. Then you’ll also get a whole slew of orders right before the deadline; these are your “last-minute Larry’s”. Regardless, you’ll be grateful for all your customers!
- Every few days, post about this sale, reminding people orders need to be placed by the deadline!
- During this time, make sure you’ve completed your entire ingredient inventory and everything you need for packaging to support the orders.
- Plan your baking schedule and bake accordingly!
I have to admit, pre-sales are how my daughter has always run her cottage baking business, before we knew “pre-sales” was a term. When she started her business at 13, we knew we had to be strategic with her time. She was an 8th grader, so she needed time to be a kid, prioritize school, friends and not be baking every day. Pre-sales work really well for this reason; maybe your schedule only allows you to bake and support one week a month; this is the perfect strategy to plan around your schedule!
Charitable or Fundraising
This is my FAVORITE strategy simply because I LOVE being able to support and give back to our community. Like I’ve said, cottage bakery businesses are primarily local, community-based, with the exception of the few states that can ship. Building relationships and supporting your community will help you grow your business tremendously. I do want to be clear, giving back and supporting others is your primary goal with this strategy, but it can often help your business by increasing your exposure in the community. I know I’m more likely to pick a company in my community if I know they are serving our community well.
From a business perspective, I know as a business-owner, you need to watch every dollar and so it’s not the first thought cottage bakers consider; after all you’re giving up some of your profit. But if there are causes, organizations or families in your community in need of support, I encourage you to determine how you can help.
Consider this, perhaps your daughter’s cheerleading team has a club to support their team. Contact the director of the club, letting them know you’d like to fundraise for them by selling some cute cheerleader cookies and that you’ll donate a percentage of your sales back to their organization. Any club director is going to be happy to receive this message and will also be more than willing to help you promote the sale! You can run this with the same approach as a pre-sale and now you have their help in promoting to all of their followers, so you are expanding your reach. After the sale is over, you will donate a percentage to the organization, feel great about helping them and now have increased exposure in your community!
Everyone wins when we support each other and be generous in our community. Not only does this give you the opportunity to support causes that are meaningful to you, but your community will thank you for it in the form of potential new customers. WIN-WIN! You can do this for any type of fundraising, causes and organizations that are important to you!
Baking Pop-Up Sales & Community Events
Many bakers have great success in hosting pop-up events either at their home or in their community. You will want to check your cottage laws because some states have restrictions around where you can pop-up an event. Some states only allow pop-up events at your home and not outside a store or elsewhere in the community.
Somewhat similar to pop-up events are Farmer’s Markets or other community events, think vendor fairs. Again, some states have rules and restrictions around these, so review your laws. On a similar note, some of the events actually have their own rules you need to comply with, so make sure to ask.
These types of events have similar considerations:
- Pop-up sales and community events can allow you to sell a huge volume of goods in a day or weekend. Conversely, they are harder to plan for because you commonly won’t know how much to bake. So, this is something to consider with this strategy – you may sell out and lose potential sales or you may end up with a lot left over.
- If you’re holding your own pop-up event, make sure you promote it in every way you can! Local community Facebook groups are always a great option. Also see if local businesses are willing to let you post a flier at their business about your upcoming sale.
- If you will be outside, prepare and plan for weather conditions. Coolers may be necessary! For example, if you’re selling hot cocoa bombs in a warm climate, plan accordingly to protect your goods.
- Make sure you have payment options available on-site! QR codes for customers to easily scan for electronic payments are very helpful. And if you’re accepting cash, have an assortment of small bills and change.
- Presentation is EVERYTHING! These types of events do require an investment in your set-up, especially at a community event or market. You need to set yourself apart to draw customer’s attention and also look professional. I encourage you to look at other baker or vendor set-ups for good ideas. If you’re going to invest in a really good set-up, I would plan to do several events to make this investment worth it.
- Have great signage and business cards. Make sure all of your goods have your business information on them or a card attached.
What Works Best for You?
I hope this post all about growing your cottage baking business offered some food for thought and options that may be successful for you. There is a lot to consider when determining the best marketing strategy or mix of strategies that will help your business grow. I also encourage you to put yourself out there and you may find other unique opportunities that work best for you. Many of the Featured Baker interviews on this site also provide GREAT advice and insight on how others have found huge success, so be sure to read those stories from those who have been there.
Leave a comment or share in our Facebook Group on what strategies you’ve had success with! And if you found this post helpful, make sure to subscribe so you never miss out on helpful future posts!