How To Promote A Bakery: A Digital Marketing Guide

While getting baked may or may not be an option for the state that you're in, serving baked goods is generally more widely accepted. However, running a bakery typically takes long, arduous hours that don't leave you the time to learn how to market your business— much less to do the marketing yourself. 

Whether you hire someone to do your marketing or do it yourself, you should know the ins and outs of marketing and how to market your bakery. 

Bakery Marketing: Strengths and Weaknesses

Like trying a new recipe, starting a new marketing campaign requires you to know your ingredients so you know how to combine them. By nature, bakeries have a few advantages in marketing that we like to leverage. 

Strengths

• Visual Appeal - More than almost any other food service, baking inherently looks good. Whether it's our penchant for sweets or the wide variety of colors available, it's easy to make baking look delightful. Whether you're shooting on your iPhone or a DSLR, you have access to plenty of content for your marketing needs. 
• Innate Ties To Positive Memories - Bakeries tend to be tied to good memories such as birthdays, weddings, and other special occasions. You don't have to improve the public perception of your industry. 

Weaknesses

• Gap Between Repeat Orders - Unfortunately, eating at a bakery daily isn't necessarily an option for most of us. Whether it's a lack of proximity or a limit on the amount of sugar we want to intake a day, the gap between repeat orders at a bakery trends higher than at a typical restaurant.
• Fewer Seating Options - (Location dependent) - Depending on the type of bakery you have, seating may be limited or may not even exist at all! This heavily limits the foot traffic to your store and means fewer people will have been to your location. 

Neither weakness is insurmountable, but they will affect how you play your cards with our marketing channels! 

Know Your Marketing Channels

Knowing your marketing channels is as important as knowing the ingredients in your kitchen. They'll all pull together to form a cohesive whole, but knowing how each works is pivotal to success. Digital Marketing for Bakeries generally includes the following channels:

• Social Media
• Website/SEO
• Google Business Profile
• Paid Ads
• 3rd Party Delivery

Social Media:

• Facebook
• Despite being the oldest social media of the bunch, Facebook still has a lot of value, especially to that of a local business. There are a couple of critical things you'll want to do here: 
• First, make sure that you have a business page for your bakery. You're going to want to make sure that your address, hours, and contact information are all easily accessible to any potential customers. If you're interested, you can also use Messenger to create an easy way for your customers to contact you. 
• Second, you will want to get involved with local groups. Most neighborhoods, small towns, or sections of bigger cities will have Facebook groups dedicated to the people there— most would be thrilled to have a local bakery. 
• Our third piece of advice is a bit more optional— some people have found success becoming active on Facebook marketplace. This will vary by location and should be researched to determine if it is worth your time. 
• Instagram
• Our goal for Instagram is twofold. First, this is our opportunity to show off all those beautiful pics you took of our baked goods. By themselves, these likely won't reach many people, but we'll want to create this good content because we'll be using it for a tactic further down the list. 
• TikTok
• Have some good video ideas? Want to hop on a trendy video train? TikTok has brought great acclaim to businesses who spend the time to learn and win the algorithm, but it is arguably the most time-intensive of the bunch. 
• The rest
• Threads, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and all the rest are valuable but probably aren't worth your time. Exceptions can be made but require a clear vision and a talented hand. 

Website

Businesses increase their chance of success when they have a website— if nothing else, it can serve as a foundation for the rest of your marketing efforts. Luckily, you can find someone to build you a website for nearly every price point in the book; the trick is to find one with all the bells and whistles you need to succeed. 

• Possible inclusions to look for are: 
• Online ordering
• Submittable Forms
• Service pages targeting the types and areas of baking you do
• Location pages 
• Each of these inclusions impacts your SEO or search engine optimization. You want to take the time to optimize your website because you want to bring in as much organic traffic as you can via search engines like Google, Bing, and Opera. 

Business Profile

For local business marketing, business profiles are your bread and butter. Similar to how for a bakery, bread and butter is your… bread and butter. A well-constructed Google/Apple Business Profile will:

• Help people find you on Search Engines
• Help you increase your Map Pack ranking (and show up on more "bakery near me" searches) 
• Provide people a quick and easy way to see your hours, website, and location

Paid Ads/Posts

Paid ads and posts are the quickest way to start directing traffic toward your website and customers to your doors. Social Ads and Search Ads each have their quirks, but both allow for targeting based on location and demographic, meaning that well-crafted ads can be very cost-efficient.

• Social Ads
• Here's where we pick up the thread from earlier. Chances are, if you're posting on social media organically, you won't see a lot of engagement or interaction. That's where promoted posts come in. Promoted posts boost the visibility of your posts, allowing them to show up like ads in peoples' feeds— while still looking like organic posts. You can promote posts to supercharge your social media efforts and appear on far more people's screens. 
• Search Ads
• If SEO is a more long-term approach to getting people to your website, Search is the toll road that can get you there faster, but for a price. Ads have access to the most premium part of the search engine result page (SERP) and can convert a high percentage of searches into clicks. 

3rd Party Delivery

This may come as a surprise, but 3rd party delivery apps are a surprisingly easy way to market your bakery! By putting yourself on apps such as UberEats or Doordash, you can appear when people need you most: when they're hungry and looking for food. This may or may not work with your bakery menu, but it can provide an easy boost if it's a good fit. 

Owning Your Online Orders

Online orders can provide a considerable boost to your business! Whether through 3rd party delivery or a 1st-party website order or app, online orders can lift your marketing and bottom line significantly. 

While the extra orders are excellent, owning your online orders provides something almost more valuable: guest data. The best of the best will use this guest data to fuel their bakery marketing strategy— and provide opportunities for your customers to keep coming back. 

Building the Best Bakery Marketing Plan

Baking can be challenging, and adding marketing on top of that can be daunting— but worth the time and effort. An important note: not every marketing channel is created equal. Different marketing channels will impact you differently depending on your location and how you run your business. Some can always be considered the base part of your cake: a Facebook Page, Google Business Profile, and a Website— while others, like TikTok or Paid Ads, will be the icing on top. 

Figure out what channels work best for you, and get baking!