Promoting Your Cake Decorating Business

Part of doing the necessary research and planning before starting your cake decorating business is figuring out how you will promote your new business.  You need to have a solid promotion strategy in place before you even begin to make cakes to make sure that there is a market for your wares and that you know how to reach that market.

No doubt you’ve already considered the usual promotion routes like the newspaper and radio or TV. But you should also consider these other promotional avenues and strategies:

The Internet – Nearly everyone is online these days.  The Internet is a perfect place to host a portfolio of your work, take orders, and give people information on your business. You can network with others and have access to unlimited promotional opportunities all for free if you’re willing to put in the time to take advantage of them.

Thinking of starting a website to take advantage of Internet promotion? Don’t bother. Websites are old news. Blogs are the hot things these days. Besides being trendy, blogs have some real advantages for small business owners.

Blog readers like to get up close and personal, so lose the formal business attitude of a website and you can reach a whole new audience. With a blog you can instantly post updates, information, or new photos of your work while making it easy for people to contact you for quotes or jobs. Blogs can bring in big business for small craftspeople like cake decorators.

Alliances and Partnerships – Hook up with someone local who sells a product or service that complements yours and work together to drum up business.

For example, if you want to specialize in wedding cakes, get hooked up with a local wedding planner.  The wedding planner can recommend you to all her clients, giving you customers, and you will be giving her clients their dream wedding cakes, which will make them happy with her service. You get customers and she gets a reliable service provider. A win/win situation.

If you want to sell holiday cakes then ally yourself with a local café and let people order their holiday cakes from you after eating a piece of cake at the café.  The café gets gourmet dessert it can sell and you get orders. Another win/win.

If you put your mind to it and think outside the box, you can find all kinds of opportunities for small business owners to work together to help promote each other’s businesses.  Think of as many potential alliances as you can to help boost your promotion and marketing strategy.