Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Three lines of revenue. One owner. Four-am start. Marketing never happens.
Most bakeries run three lines of revenue: the retail counter (morning sourdough loaf and viennoiserie rush, lunchtime sandwich trade, afternoon patisserie), wholesale (sourdough, baguette and laminated lines into cafes and restaurants three to five days a week, often the most profitable line per labour hour), and occasion cakes (birthdays, weddings, cake smash and the booked-twelve-weeks-out specialty work). Each is a different customer, a different sales cycle and a different keyword set. The owner is on the bench by 4am, on the counter by 7am, packing the wholesale rounds by 11am, and quoting the occasion-cake enquiry from Saturday's market by 8pm. The marketing that wins each line (a wholesale landing page for cafes, a 'sourdough [suburb]' SEO play, an occasion-cake gallery with venue and wedding photos) is exactly the work that doesn't happen between the long ferment and the 4am start.
Good bakery marketing has three jobs running at the same time: a retail-storefront SEO play that ranks 'sourdough [suburb]' and 'best bakery near me' in your postcode so the morning loaf-buyer and the weekend brunch-buyer find you; a wholesale landing page with pricing per dozen, delivery window, and a portfolio of the cafes you supply, so cafe owners shopping for a new bread supplier find you on a Google search; and an occasion-cake gallery with venue-tagged wedding work and birthday cake examples, with a structured enquiry form (date, head count, design brief, dietaries) so the bookings can be quoted on the same day. Most bakeries do one and let the other two slide.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around the three revenue lines that actually grow the bakery: lifting the retail-counter weekend trade, winning new wholesale accounts, and booking out the occasion-cake calendar twelve weeks ahead. Briefs the other agents so the suburb pages, the wholesale landing page, the wedding-cake gallery and the bake-bench posts all push toward the same outcome.
Ships a clean menu page library so 'sourdough Newtown', 'wholesale bakery Sydney' and 'wedding cake Marrickville' find you instead of the chain or the patisserie a suburb over. Imports your existing site, makes the wholesale enquiry form and the cake-order form bigger than the logo, and keeps the occasion-cake gallery up to date with one-tap photo uploads from the bench.
Owns the work that decides whether you rank in the map pack for 'sourdough near me' and 'bakery [suburb]': complete Google Business Profile beating the chain on completeness, menu-page schema, review prompts after the loyalty stamp triggers, and the technical fixes that keep you indexed. Auto-applies the low-risk stuff.
Runs steady year-round Google campaigns on 'wedding cake [suburb]' and 'birthday cake [suburb]' (low daily spend, high intent), and a wholesale Meta campaign targeted at cafe owners and restaurant operators within a 15km delivery radius. Pauses retail-counter ads when the morning queue's already out the door.
Turns every bake into content in your voice: a reel of the 5am viennoiserie tray coming out, a carousel of Saturday's wedding cake build, a behind-the-bench shot of the long-ferment dough being shaped, a chocolate-work close-up for the patisserie. Builds the bake-as-content rhythm that earns the second-look customer and the wholesale enquiry. You shoot one frame at the bench, the agent drafts, you approve.
Drafts the longer pieces customers and wholesale buyers read between visits: 'how long does sourdough fermentation take', 'wedding cake costs in Sydney: what does $800 actually get you', 'lamination vs viennoiserie: what makes a real croissant'. Two a month, in your voice, that bring search traffic in at the consideration stage and double as wholesale-buyer education.
Your first 30 days.
- Wholesale-to-cafe partner page indexed and ranking for 'wholesale sourdough [city]'
- Occasion-cake gallery indexed across wedding, smash and milestone cakes
- 4am bench production-reel cadence running, drafted from bake-time videos
- Long-ferment sourdough explainer page live and linked from every loaf product page
- Retail bag and Christmas-hamper subscription page live with the next peak loaded
- Google profile rebuilt as 'Bakery' with wholesale and occasion-cake categories
- Wholesale Meta campaign live targeting cafe owners within 15km
- Retail, wholesale and occasion-cake line plan delivered by Sam
Bakeries that grow past their morning loaf rush aren't the ones with the prettiest tray shots. They are the ones whose wholesale page ranks for 'wholesale sourdough [city]' on the cafe owner's Monday morning search, whose occasion-cake gallery shows real recent wedding work, and whose Google Business profile beats the chain on photos and review velocity. Every one of those is a job that has to happen every week, forever, and it's the work that gets eaten by the 4am bench start.
Agencies are too expensive to actually run the three-line content engine and the occasion-cake ads for a bakery at $3k a month. Tools are cheap but you write the viennoiserie caption at 9pm. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the wholesale and cake pages, post the 5am bench, run the wedding-cake ads and keep the Google Business profile bookable. You snap one frame from the bench, approve the week between rounds, done.