Digital Menu Boards – A Novices Guide.

By | August 23, 2009

Restaurant Owners Are Finding Digital Menu Boards As A Way To Increase Profit

As traditional in-store marketing is converting to digital signage, the trend is seen in the restaurant industry. Rather than having employees slide plastic inserts into a track of the old backlit boards together with the old blackboard that took an employee most of the morning to write the menu of the day on, digital menu boards are appearing and making life easier and more profitable.

Customers are greeted with dynamic content, this results in increased sales as well as more repeat business.

Today we will look at Digital Menu Boards for the novice.

Chalkboards are long gone, yes they were cheap to maintain yet bland and boring and extremely labour intensive. These were more popular in the Fast – Food Restaurants, these once established were franchised and the franchise owner had the sole responsibility to drive traffic (paying customers) to the restaurant.

At this point the chalkboards were made redundant and replaced by high gloss printed posters, showing the product in the optimum way. Imagine looking for a meal deal without the printed poster…

Fast –Food Restaurants became aware that visual appear results in increased sales, so let us look at the following points.

3 Advantages of a Digital Menu Board Network

–a digital menu board network can be controlled from one central location, eliminating employees having to manually change the menus. A network of thousands of digital menus can be controlled by one person!

Easy Product Changes – when there are a number of menu boards on a digital network, menu and price changes, as well as promotional content can be updated simultaneously throughout the network with one click of the mouse.

Feature more products – with the use of dynamic content, this offers the ability to add or remove menu items without having to touch a menu board. They also allow for day parting so you can target the menu items for breakfast, lunch and dinner items.

In a modern restaurant expect to see two types of digital signage, one is the digital menu boards and the other is dining -area digital signage, both contribute to increasing sales and boosting the promotional items.

Digital Menu Boards.

Digital menu boards are the largest opportunity for any restaurant to deploy digital signage into its work areas. One of the major benefits of a digital menu is that it saves so much space and overcomes the item change limitations of standard backlit boards.

There are two types of digital menu boards, the networked type and the standalone type.

Standalone Digital Menu Board – these are an inexpensive solution, were a restaurant can use JPEG images to create their own dynamic content with promotion meal deals etc. The content is then stored on an internal memory card and is looped to display as many items as the restaurant wants to promote. (Ideal for the small Fast Food Restaurant)

Networked Digital Menu Board – these are networked enabled and can be connected to any business network, so that the content can be controlled from one single area. These also allow for better content creation, as you can use flash to create some fantastic campaigns.

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