To say it’s been a rough road for the restaurant business in the last few years would be an understatement. But change is the one constant in the catering sector and one way to ensure you navigate that change with grace is to stay ahead of the curve.
Digital menu boards have been slowly becoming the standard in many restaurants across the country, particularly fast-food establishments. These wall-mounted or freestanding digital LED displays are a more flexible and vibrant alternative to traditional chalkboards and posters that offer far more than just pretty colours and animations.
It’s an option that will immediately add a more modern aesthetic to your restaurant and act as a more enticing visual for customers with more room for images, animations and even more ambitious content.
1. Boost profits and minimise waste
Most businesses that start using digital menu boards will make their investments back within the first 18 months as they offer unlimited screen real estate to work with. This means you could fit potentially hundreds of menu boards onto one screen as well as advertising and any promotions you might have going on. You can even update the board as certain items sell out. What all this means for your bottom line is no more printing costs and no time wasted hanging up posters and passing out menus.
2. Show more information
Customers of today care more than ever about what is in their food. A digital menu board allows you to advertise not only what you’re selling but what makes your food special. That could mean showing allergy and nutritional information, spotlighting the use of local ingredients, or including more basic information such as whether it’s vegan-friendly. These are the ‘little things’ that will all add up to making your establishment stand out from the pack.
3. Engage the customers
If your customers are happy then you’re more likely to keep them coming back. If you’re running a counter service restaurant that commonly sees long lines, digital menus can be used to actively engage with your customers, whether that be with on-brand messaging, games, social media posts or even short films and videos. If the customers are more engaged by the visuals, they are also more likely to reach menu decisions faster, reducing potential bottlenecks at the checkout and making wait times feel smaller, in general.
4. Speed and convenience
As a digital menu board can be updated with just a few taps or swipes from your tablet, laptop or smartphone, things can be added, removed, and edited in literal seconds. This means you can also experiment with different layouts and designs and update them as and when you see fit. It also means that the menu the customers are seeing is always going to be the current menu.
5. Everyone can see!
Inclusion is a buzzword that has gained significant traction in recent years and rightly so. Digital menu boards allow for those who might otherwise have struggled to read the menu to not only enjoy clearer high-definition text but visualise what they’re ordering too. So, in theory, nobody should ever order the wrong meal again.
Image: ZikG / Shutterstock.com
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