To make your business known

If your kids go to a school where they have yearly agenda’s you could ask the school how you can get to be in that. I have magnetic signs on my care but really get next to no business off of that, just makes me have to be nicer when driving,lol. Go to daycare centers , gas stations, hair dressing salons and small boutiques and ask if you can leave your business cards. Some places have notice boards just for those type of things. Make flyers for some of those types of places that offer a small discount like 10% for first time cake. Let your local police station and fire station know you offer a 10% discount for first responders if you do offer that. Make sure you have a fb page and webpage, they have been where I get most of my business. Hope that helps, good luck.

thanks for the info…
this will help me too.

Another place you could make yourself known is the party venues – places that will house 50 – 100 guests, serving food and with a dance floor. If you get to know the manager – who takes any enquiries from potential customers – this is always a rich source of potential customers. (It was for me anyway). Good luck

Word of mouth is huge in the cake biz. Try taking a cake or some cupcakes into Dr offices, real estate offices (these are great because the agents often need food for their open houses), school offices, church offices, and to wedding related businesses.
All of these will come into contact with potential clients.
We are getting ready to move and I plan to hook up local photographers with samples of my goodies and brochures so that they know I am available for smash cakes for 1st birthday photos and such.

I don’t make cakes as my business, but I do know the web and other types of freelancing.

Word of mouth is great of course, but you often want to have something to give them too. This means fliers, business cards, or other ideas people have already pointed out, like brochures.

Having a web presence works hand in hand with this, just put your website URL on your fliers or cards. You can have your whole cake portfolio on your site with pricing or ordering information, make a Facebook page to go along with it and add a ‘like’ button so people can share it around, and maybe get your site listed in some local directories.

If you have any questions about websites or the online advertising side of things, I don’t mind answering them if I can be of help.

For me my number one focus when I started my business 5 years ago was to make sure everyone in our town knew the name Kosmic Custom Cakes. I wanted to be in everyone’s face and always on their mind.

The way I went about that was donations: To the schools/fire stations/police dept./spas/etc. – Each and every time they would ask how they could pay me back, I always replied “Just tell your friends” – “Shout us out on FB” – etc.

It was the best investment I could have ever made and very glad I didn’t waste my money in advertising – Instead with time the word of mouth was rapid.

I wish you the best of luck! HIT THE PAVEMENT…..you’ll quickly see the rewards :)

Hey there. My wife and I had a small home-based bakery in Chesapeake, VA and we found that the best way to get quality traffic to our site was to take advantage of Google’s local search. If you are on a location enabled device, like a phone or table or even a computer on wifi, Google will give you local search results first. This means that if your website is properly set up you can get ranked up there with Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes. We ranked in the top 5 of our local search for “custom cakes” which gave us LOTS of traffic.

If you’d like to read more about how we did this check out my article that outlines how to do it. http://bakerybutler.com/blog/marketing/seo-tricks-for-your-bakery

Good luck! If you have any questions be sure to message me.