It has been more than two years since the launch of the SakéOne website on our evergreen CMS platform, implementing a design that showcases individual pages for the saké company's unique brands of saké featured on the site.
For your background, SakéOne is a member of Oregon's thriving brewing community and the premiere creator of American-made saké. Located in Forest Grove, Ore., SakéOne brews and distributes American and Japanese saké, offering a plethora of saké and saké-related merchandise.
With the recent flurry of new activity and additions to the site, we wanted to see how the evergreen CMS has been treating them. I interviewed SakéOne marketing coordinator, Sarah Brown, to get some insight.
cascade: You are consistently adding new content to your site with unique landing pages to complement marketing efforts, for example your new Kibo brand page, with the www.kibosake.com URL that redirects back to the main site. Are there plans to create more pages and content along these lines to showcase other brands?
Brown: Yes! I’m currently working on another brand page mockup for one of our newest products, Hakutsuru Saké, and we are excited to put up a landing page for this new line. SakéOne acquired the U.S. distribution of Hakutsuru a few months ago [May 2014], and it has been a huge transition for us.
Along with adding brand pages, we want to add a blog feature for the site to keep our customers and distributors in the loop on all of our saké brands, and share information beyond our news and events module, which we use all the time.
cascade: What features provided by the evergreen CMS do you use most/like the best on your website?
Brown: The best part about our site is we are able to share a great deal of information about saké in a variety of forms -- videos, news articles, recipes, and product pages and subpages that are great sales guides for different breweries and distributors. We point a lot of people to different places on the site. I like to use social media to direct people to the recipes on the cocktail page. I also like the way we are able to compile news articles and press releases from different writers and reviewers in our news section.
cascade: Since you’re in charge of marketing, how have you used the website to help achieve marketing goals?
Brown: Well, we don’t pay for mainstream advertising and use mostly press releases and social media for promotion, so the site has been huge in terms of using social to point people to the SakéOne site, and to publish press releases. I often point writers to specific pages on our site to give them information they can link to in their articles. The wealth of information hosted on the site and getting people to link back to us has been our biggest marketing strength.
cascade: What is your favorite Saké? What do you like best about working for SakéOne?
Brown: My favorite Saké, that's a hard one - it’s between our g joy and the Momokawa Organic Junmai), but I’m going to have to go with g joy. It has bolder flavors, pairs well with pizza, BBQ, and other non-traditional saké pairing foods because it was made for the American pallet. The best part about my job is that it has been a huge learning experience over the past year and a half. I had never tried saké before, and now I have had the opportunity to take many trainings, and I even teach my friends about it.
Be sure to follow SakeOne on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, and check out the SakéOne project overview and learn more about how the evergreen CMS platform has helped leverage the SakéOne brand with an intuitive, user-friendly website.