Results:
+17% Increase Time on Page
+15% Increase in Organic Search
Silver Addy Award
Extremely happy client
PINTS & PIXELS
Drinking Up Uinta's Website
Utah is known for many things: gorgeous national parks, one-of-a-kind skiing, salt flats and saltier lakes. Beer? Not so much. Understandable, seeing as draft beer is capped at a literal buzz-killing 4.0% ABV. But if you dig past the stereotypes and easy jokes at the Beehive State’s expense, you’ll find craft brewers cooking up some seriously exciting beers. The largest (and in our humble opinion, best) of these is Uinta Brewing. Founded in 1993, the brewery’s creator set out to make the best beer in one of the most unexpected of places.
Uinta's digital presence was severely dated and in no way a good representation of the brewery today. They were in the process of refreshing their brand & packaging design, but had not gotten very far when brought on. The timing wasn't ideal, but the opportunity to help refresh the Uinta brand through the digital lens was too good to pass up. In addition once the new web site launched there would need to be engagement drivers to build stronger awareness and audience following.
While working through the creative strategy we always kept in mind the end user, and the reason they would be visiting the site and what about our site could be different and important to new craft beer drinkers. Through research two distinct trends surfaced that helped guide the project: 1) Millennials are twice as likely to purchase craft beer based on label/packaging design and 2) they are also more likely to use their smartphones in-store when making a purchase decision.
While Uinta was in the process of addressing the first point, the challenge was bridging the gap to the second point to create a holistic brand experience. The site (especially on mobile) needed to continue the brand story, but also offer up the information people were searching for while standing at the shelf making a purchase decision. Beer is easy to identify and select, even on mobile. The beer detail pages are designed to not just list ABV, SRM and IBUs, but to add context through animations and photography; making the science behind the beer all the more delicious.
At the heart of the entire project was the “Get Thirsty” philosophy. A philosophy that made people stop and say “damn, I could go for one of those,” no matter where they were when they accessed the site. This strategy was a phrase we constantly held our ideas, designs and copy up against, asking “does this make you thirsty?” And not just thirsty for beer, but for brew information, events and adventure in the wild. It often times made us thirsty so we knew it was working.
Since the brand and packaging were in flux designing the digital presence was challenging. That's when we knew we couldn't just jump right into page designs. So we took a step back and used the challenge more as an opportunity to refresh the brand in a more deconstructed sense to distill out new ways of visually conveying the brand to the audience. We investigated a few different types of approaches ranging from clean, minimalist and edgy to softer, illustrative and more approachable. In the end we combined a few elements that stood out the most into one more defined cohesive look, essentially what you see today at UintaBrewing.com.
What:
Untappd is a great app for beer discovery, constantly encouraging people to be adventurous in their beer-drinking. One of the app’s highlights is offering badges to users for trying new beers in new places.
How:
As an extension of our Goes Well With Anywhere campaign, we would create a badge or series of badges that combine drinking a Uinta beer with a location off the beaten path (say, 20 miles from the closest bar, or above 6,000 feet, or 5 miles out to sea) as a way to encourage current and future Uinta drinkers not to just try a new beer, but to invite us along as an accomplice in their adventures.
What:
The fall hop harvest is craft brewing’s favorite time of year, and breweries around the country race to get the fresh hops from vine to kettle in as short of time as possible. This year we’re going to turn the great hop harvest into a live-blogged road trip from our favorite hop farms back to the brewery in SLC.
How:
Members of our brew team will hop in an Airstream trailer and make their way from the PNW back to Utah with hops in hand, stopping at beer festivals and other events on the way for fans to sample special, one-off beers and witness a brew demonstration via a 10-gallon batch of fresh-hopped beer.
Ahead of the tour, fans can vote on special ingredients to go into each batch of our fresh-hopped beer. Want some mango in your IPA? Pineapple? Habanero? We’ll make suggestions and leave it up to the fans to decide.
What:
An ongoing look at the development of our beers, in our brewer’s own words. From the runaway successes to the “needs more work” to the “oops, we made vinegar,” we’ll share our adventures in brewing with our fans.
How:
Through a dedicated Uinta Brewmaster Instagram account (and also living on our blog), our brewers will take the reigns and show us what is going on day-to-day in the brew house that excites them. Are they experimenting with a new ingredient? Is there a new shipment of bourbon barrels arriving? Is it hop harvest? The Grain To Growler series focuses on the craft and gives our brewers a platform to geek out about all the things we have coming down the bottling line.
