Branding your cake business
Love painting animals? Make it your niche. Pet portrait cakes. Make a few dummy portraits, post them, blog about the type of image you work from, your favourites etc.
Ok I’m cheating as I also run half of a branding business, but how many of you have really thought about how to grow a tribe of loyal fans, who will keep coming back and recommend your cakes to all their friends?
Many wedding cake business owners just think that building a brand is not important to them: a wedding cake is a one-off (hopefully) purchase so just move on to attracting the next customer at a wedding fair or with a Facey ad.
Thing is, a trillion hobby bakers have joined us in this already undervalued market, and this is forcing prices down. I’ve seen 8in celebration cakes advertised for £35 in London.
You need to build a brand story or strategy to elevate your cakes above the competition. I’ll start you off.
Create a bunch of dummies of different sizes and photograph them from different angles. Blog about the techniques you’ve used. Post them on your instagram stories with testimonials. These should be the cakes you LOVE making and are good at.
STOP copying other peoples’ cakes immediately. This has never been a problem for me because I simply don’t have the skills to make a car, motorbike, sewing machine or Paw Patrol cake. But if you do, it’s tempting to copy other peoples’ cakes all the time. This problematic for so many reasons: it’s not your design; you may not be able to replicate it exactly and your customer may refuse to pay; there may be legal issues with the use of some characters and logos. Most of all it’s pointless. Apart from the cash, this will do nothing toward you forging your own style. If a potential customer sends you a pic of a cake they like, it’s just a cake they like. Say you can’t copy but you’ll send over a sketch of a design that will have a similar character but it will be yours.
Publish your prices. If your cakes are mostly bespoke, include a gallery of recent cakes and caption each with the price you’d like to get for that type of cake. Make the more detailed cakes and those you don’t like making more expensive.
Only post images on social media and your website of cakes you enjoy making and that you think represent your style well. Set aside a few days to make some dummies along these lines and photograph them to post. Take shots from different angles and close ups. With three different shots of three cakes you’ve filled your Instagram grid. This is easier with buttercream cakes as they are easier to strip off and add to etc, but you should be working with buttercream anyway. Fondant is dead.
When you post on Instagram, use hashtags to filter views towards the cakes you WANT to make. For example, if you love making sugar flowers, hashtag sugarflowers, floral cakes, rosecakes and so on, even if they don’t really feature that much in the image you’re posting. #bobthebuildercake is getting you nowhere even if it’s accurate. There’s probably an opportunity to place a few tiny flowers around Bob’s boots if this seems unethical.
Tell people why you started making cakes in the first place and what makes your cakes different. If you were seeking something in particular, so will others be. These are your tribe. They’ll bring you business. Put your personality out there. Smile.