78. Baking it Down - Friction and Floooow

🚫 Friction and Flow ✅Ever been to a gym? No no - this isn't a Q3 "News Years Resolution" check-in (thank goodness), but it is a look at how gyms use friction and flow to direct customers to actions they do and don't want ya to take. When you go to sign up for a gym membership, it's a red carpet experience. They assign you a team of people to whisk you away for the Tour de la Gym! Registration fees? Waived. First month? Free. Extra kidney? Included with a first-year contract.  (I kid...ney on that last one - but it's close). When you want to cancel? You need it in writing 30-days prior to your cancelation date with proof that you were required by the FBI to fly to Mars for the first manned space mission. Oh and that extra kidney? They want it back plus interest. 🚫 Friction and Flow. ✅🚫 Unintentional Friction Points.Whether we like to or not (see: hate it), the gym's cancellation friction point is very intentional. They do not want you to cancel that membership, so help them. However, some businesses may be unintentionally implementing friction points - and it's driving their clients away. Unintentional friction points are essentially "choke points" in your user experience. Something you did that drives people away from your goal action. These are not good for business.Unintentional Friction Points can look like this:🚫 When you don’t have a website or Facebook and people have to order from your personal profile.  🚫 Adding additional steps to be able to purchase like “comment down below, I’ll DM you with the order link.”  🚫 Hosting a contest and requiring 5 steps to enter to win.  🚫 Only taking payments through Paypal Friends and Family. On paper - they all look good! Taking orders on social media, DM clients a link to order quickly, get your engagement contest out there to more people and make sure more of your money ends up in your bank account. ✅ Sounds good to me! 🚫 🚫 🚫  But - unintentional friction points, yo.In reality, these could be driving your audience to take actions you don't want - like, er, not ordering from you. The friction points above could lead to these unintended actions:✅ People who don't use Facebook won't order from you - simply because they can't get past Facebook's paywall. ✅ People will lose interest or second guess their decision to buy while waiting for you to DM the link. ✅ People won't tag friends or share the posts because it's annoying to said friends.✅ Your clients will feel exposed since PayPal ensures them they won't have buyer protection. They abandon check-out with you.When we don't "brake check" our friction points, we leave money on the table - and sadly, we often don't even see it. None of the above was intentional; however, it was a wallet-thinner. ✅  Intentional Friction Points. Now let's flip the script. How can we intentionally use friction points to get Imore from our target audience? Glad you ask (even if you didn't). Here goes:🚫  Double-opt-in email list requiring people to sign up for your emails and then confirm by accepting the subscription via email.🚫 Using Jotform to disable your calendar for unavailable dates.🚫  Putting end dates to your pre-sales.🚫  Sending them to Eventbrite for class tickets and not accepting ticket purchases anywhere else.These all provide friction in an intentional way - to produce desired results. Let's look at what these intentional friction points translate to - well, listen to the podast lol.

Om Podcasten

👋 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!