For most food retailers, the display of menus or products can be a deal-breaker. Your signage informs your customers about the products your establishment has to offer, and communicates essential information such as pricing and company branding or personality.
These factors are key in informing customer choice, and studies show that nearly half of people (49%) deem the menu as the most important factor when choosing a restaurant. Prospective diners use menus to judge the quality, appeal, and value of your business, making them crucial conversion points in customer sales.
Menu Boards: Digital Vs. Printed
The emergence of digital signage has allowed many businesses to revolutionise the way their special offers are displayed. Updating in-store advertisements and signage is no longer a case of changing hefty printed billboards in multiple locations. Instead, changes can be achieved remotely with innovative digital screen publishing tools that instantly publish across multiple in-store displays.
When it comes to comparing both digital and printed media, digital signage takes the lead. It offers a higher return on objectives (ROO) – increasing customer engagement, conversion, and retention. When promoting a special offer, it’s likely these are the qualities you want your advertisements to possess.
In fact, 58% of retailers found that by adopting digital experiences in-store, they improved customer retention due to the increased visibility of their special offers.
Additionally, digital displays are more cost-effective over time in comparison to printed displays. Printed media is expensive to roll-out across multiple locations, and printing budgets can restrict how often you're able to change displays.
Digital signage has ‘plug & play’ functionality, meaning it only requires the simple setup of your physical digital signage assets. Content management is accessible through one easy-to-use dashboard – streamlining the publishing process.
How Can Digital Menu Boards Help?
1. Bring Your Products to Life
Digital signage provides eye-catching visuals that extend far beyond the abilities of a printed image. If you’re walking down the street on a cold morning, it’s likely your attention will be caught by a moving, steaming cup of coffee pictured on a bright digital display – rather than a dull, printed image.
Digital signage has the power to bring your products to life, and this can easily translate to displaying special offers on your digital menus too. The human brain is hard-wired to be enticed by food imagery, and digital menus can play into ‘visual hunger’ to pull in potential new customers. If your target audience can easily visualise an appealing product – and it’s matched by a special offer – it’s obvious to see how this can be the perfect combination to increase your sales.
2. Target Your Conversion Sweet Spots
The placement of your signage is crucial to its success, and digital displays can be positioned in specific ‘sweet spots’ where customers are more likely to notice it.
Businesses can conduct surveys to learn more about their customers’ behavior and pinpoint the areas of their premises where customers are likely to make a purchase.
Effective digital signage that displays special offers can then be placed in these areas to increase awareness and grab the attention of your target audience.
For example, MIX convenience store experienced an increased number of customer walk-ins inquiring about specific products and special offers after installing digital signage outside their store. Similarly, if your restaurant displays a digital menu outside it’s likely the bright imagery will attract attention and influence dining decision-making.
3. Instantly Update Special Offers
Often, special offers are time-based – and sometimes only available for a limited period – so it can be a lengthy process to chop-and-change traditional printed signage, especially across multiple locations.
Digital menu boards can automatically be updated in conjunction with special offer periods, and only display certain products or deals when they are relevant. This allows businesses to have greater contextual power over what they display and adapt their menus to show only the most relevant products.
Convenience stores can push the promotion of cold beverages on a hot day in just a few clicks using digital screen publishing, or instantly alter their menu dependant on key company calendar events.
In comparison, printed signage would take significantly longer to change and apply across multiple locations.
4. Time-Trigger Your Displays
Digital signage gives your business the flexibility to automatically schedule time-triggers for the products displayed on your menu boards. For example, businesses can automate when to display certain items dependant on the time of
This removes the burden of repeating “sorry, we don’t serve X after 10:30 am” to disappointed customers and saves staff changing printed billboards.
Additionally, time-triggers can be used to display promotional offers whenever your business sees fit, whether on a 30-second cycle, or once per hour. This lets you create a promotional cycle that is bespoke to your store, and by optimizing your digital signage specific to your customers or location, it’s likely you’ll drive higher levels of audience engagement.
5. Roll-out Promotions Remotely
Businesses that have multiple locations can struggle rolling-out promotions on traditional signage. The process of printing, shipping out, and displaying special offers across multiple stores can be extremely lengthy, and there is extensive room for human error.
Additionally, it can be extremely costly if your printed signs are incorrect or damaged along the way – potentially causing a chaotic and disjointed promotional campaign.
Printed displays require co-operation from each individual store manager to display them, and, what's more, it can be left open to interpretation how they’re shown in-store. This causes inconsistencies in the ways your special offers and menus are presented, leading to reduced brand consistency across your locations.
If your menus vary throughout the day, or by season, campaign, or price, it’s easy to see how printed displays can become a pain-point in communicating reliable information. Digital signage can publish special offers remotely – all from one centralised dashboard – so that you experience consistent, quick, and reliable publishing of your signage.
Hungry for More?
It’s estimated that the digital signage industry will be worth $32.84 billion by 2023. Of the many industries switching to digital, 40% of the market is accounted for by retailers, and it’s easy to see why the food-retail industry is keen to embrace the trend.
Digital menu boards not only offer high levels of customization, but they also are a great way of promoting your special offers on bright, visible, and eye-catching displays. If you'd like to learn more, download our free screen publishing e-book today.
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