Benefits of Digital Menu Boards
1) A Digital Menu is Worth a Thousand Bites
A digital menu board replaces your traditional signs and posters. It shows a more realistic expectation of what your food looks like, giving you the opportunity to draw people in and make them hungry. A digital menu gives you better control over where your customer’s eyes go. Take advantage of video and animated gifs. Entertain and educate people waiting in line or walking by your restaurant.
Sure, a calligraphy-filled chalkboard menu looks great (if you use a great artist!), but that’s a whole lot of information to get across on a platform most found in daycares. What happens when you want to update your menu or promote a new feature? And neon fonts aren’t the easiest for everyone to read. Digital menus are bright, clear, and allow you to make smart use of negative space, making your signage easy and fun to look at.
2) Save Time by Maintaining a Digital Menu
Imagine working at McDonald’s 15 years ago. It’s 11 a.m. and breakfast is officially over, so your manager asks you to go out to the drive-thru and manually flip the menu over to lunch. What happens if you’re even one minute late to perform this task? You’re bound to confuse the drive-thru queue and you might even anger one of your customers who was expecting an Egg McMuffin.
Digital signage software is flexible, allowing you to communicate your message with your target audience when and where they need it. Use digital signage software to configure your digital menus to change as needed — at certain times each day, on specific days of the week for daily specials, or for other timely promotions. And one change made using digital signage software can update the digital menus in all your restaurants — no matter where they are or how many you have.
3) Spend Less with a Digital Menu
Restaurants without digital menus have a line item on their budgets that restaurants with digital menus don’t have. After investing in digital signage, you no longer have to send regular promotions and menu changes to your printers. Your front-line staff won’t be responsible for taking down and replacing old poster boards. Simply, save on hard costs and involve fewer people.
With a digital menu, you not only cut the printer out of the picture, but your design gets easier and easier. When you get access to the creative you need, you control the user experience using digital signage software. It’s easy to learn and manage, so you can cut out the middleman. Display your Facebook feed to enhance your content and encourage your customers to like your page, show a calendar of upcoming events, and set up schedules to show the right content at the right time of the day and week.
4) Digital Menus Create a More Memorable Customer Experience
Digital menus entertain your customers. A digital display outside your restaurant is more likely to draw in someone walking by than a menu inside a glass frame. A digital menu board is your opportunity to bring the menu to life. It goes beyond listing the items available for choosing — it includes enticing graphics, edutaining videos, lists specials, and everything else you want your customers to know. In some areas, it’s required by law to list calorie content — what a mess this small print would make all over your traditional menus!
No flat cardboard sign ever made a mouth water. Don’t lose to your competitors already taking advantage of what digital menus offer. And take this as an opportunity to stand out from the crowd already falling behind.
5) Keep Your Business Open 24/7
A digital menu takes your restaurant outside, too. Not only can you say goodbye to the host offering menus to passersby outside your restaurant, you get to tell your story during off hours. Is your restaurant in a busy area? Set up an evening schedule using your digital signage software so your evening digital menu is tailored to those night owls who might be wandering by.
Show off why people will want to revisit during regular business hours! Display a video of your head chef making magic, share photos of happy customers enjoying their meals, give out a promotion special to these customers. They’ll come back.
Stop losing customers and up your digital menu game! Sign up now and get started with our free open source digital signage software. If you need a hand building out your new menus, our creative team is standing by to help you make your customers say “Wow!”
And please… long gone are the days of the sign-spinner.
