How to Make a Digital Menu Board for Your Restaurant

Advancing technology has made it possible to have your restaurant menu on TV screens or digital signage. Digital signage menus comprise of software and hardware components that display the menu’s content with pictures on screens. Unlike traditional static signage, digital signage enables restaurants to include full-motion graphic videos in their menu displays.

Like other technological investments, most restaurant owners wonder how fast they can achieve returns on investments by installing digital signage. However, digital signage offers several benefits to restaurants. Besides making it easy to update content, improving visual appeal, and enable remote management, they have proven effective in increasing sales.

Create Your Restaurant Menus

Most restaurants already have printed menus that work adequately. However, digital menus provide endless flexibility and convenience. Since most fast food or QSR restaurants rely on rapid customer iteration to keep their interests, digital menu boards come in handy.

With this technology, you can have several products on display with different visuals every few minutes. With this, you can easily display a special menu for lunch, dinner, and specific days of the week. Traditional printed menus cannot provide such convenience.

Consider the Look You Want

While digital menu boards can positively impact your restaurant, poorly designed boards can hinder their success. Poor design and irrelevant content on digital menu boards can drown your business by reducing the chances of returning customers. That said, visuals play a significant role in ensuring the success of your digital menu board.

Ensure that you design a visually appealing menu board for a better impression and increase customer retention. Since humans are majorly visual beings, customers will most likely remember your visually appealing menu board longer than plain text.

Using a properly designed digital menu board also differentiates your business from other competitors. Since all restaurants offer similar goods and services, visually appealing digital menu boards could be the distinguishing factor between your business and your competitors.

That said, ensure that your digital menu board has a clear message, features attractive graphics, has no hidden messages, uses the right font, clear of errors and design flaws. Observing this ensures that your menu boards stand out from the competition.

Select the Right Solution

To increase sales, improve customer experience, and customer retention with your digital menu boards, you should ensure that you select the right digital signage solution. This includes selecting the right digital signage hardware, software, and signage player.

The right hardware should be a priority for restaurant digital signage. Interestingly, more than 74% of customers prefer an easy to read menu when deciding what to eat or drink in a restaurant. Therefore, since the hardware determines the menu board’s overall visual appeal, ensure that you select the best.

Using appropriate digital signage players also makes it easy to deploy your menu content on screens. Fortunately, most of these players feature pre-loaded digital signage software. Carefully study the specific features of every player before making a choice. You can consult full-service digital signage experts for better advice on this.

Think of Your Customers

You should prioritize and focus on how the digital menu boards will attract your customer’s attention. With more customers, especially women finding the point of purchase displays impressive, you should ensure that your digital menu boards meet your customer’s expectations.

That said, ensure that your digital display immediately catches your customer’s attention. The display should feature impressive graphics, fresh content, and innovative sign language that makes your customers take their eyes off their smartphones. The displays should market your products and provide educative and entertaining content.

However, to achieve this, ensure that you steer clear of these common digital menu board mistakes. With the competitive nature of digital displays, understanding your target customers, and creating visuals that appeal can be challenging. Therefore, include mouth-watering food visuals and impressive content to your digital restaurant menu board’s layout.

Add Visual Appeal

You cannot ignore the importance of visual appeal and communication in digital menu boards. As mentioned, visual appeal significantly contributes to your customer’s decision. This is why your digital signage should have compelling visuals.

Key components of a visually appealing digital menu board include perfect typography, good color choice, perfect content tone, clear contrast, font size, orientation, and shape of the board. A good combination of these visual components is essential in ensuring that your customers retain the message and increases the chances of success.

That aside, displaying visually appealing digital signage without clear focus might not be effective. Therefore, you should target your customers by day, time, and location for maximum reach. Since you have only a few seconds to grab a passer-by’s attention, ensure that you create visually appealing digital signage displays.

If you need some inspiration, check out these 5 digital menu display board examples.

Update Menus as Needed

The flexibility and convenience of digital signage menu boards make them perfect for the ever-dynamic restaurant business. Unlike dynamic menus that will require new prints outs to change the content, you can change the content on digital menu boards with a few clicks using digital signage.

Several factors influence how frequently you should change the menu items on your digital signage. Among them include seasonal updates for new meals and inventory changes. Regardless of the reason, integrating an app on your digital menu boards makes it easier to update your menu as much as possible.

Bottom Line

Advancing technology has revolutionized several restaurant activities, including menu displays. Adopting this tech in your restaurant is beneficial, as it not only differentiates you from competitors but also boosts sales and returning customers. For assured success, work with a professional digital signage company.