If you're involved in digital marketing for your restaurant business, you might be looking for ideas about creating a menu app. With people increasingly using smartphones to look up restaurants and food items, building an app is becoming increasingly popular. The following points highlight some of the benefits of using an app instead of a static website or paper menus to promote your restaurant business.
Mobile Responsive Design to fit smaller screens
The first digital menu I ever saw was in a restaurant near me. It was a long scroll of text and photos, so that you couldn't find what you wanted until you scrolled past several items you didn't want. This was obviously a bad idea. What is worse, the experience confirmed a misunderstanding. Many people think that if a lot of text fits on a screen, it must be easy to read. That turns out not to be the case. People understand only a couple of sentences at once. Fortunately, digital technology allows us to fit more text on screens, and even better, lets us fit text that you can change. So digital menus let you find exactly what you want, not just what you think you want. The modern digital menu also lets you put pictures next to items. This lets you show people pictures of what they'll get, not just tell them about it. The menu above is an example. It shows pictures of what each item looks like, and lets you click on a feature to learn more. The third big improvement is speed. Digital menus let you change everything in one place, and can change things instantly. Digital menus may seem expensive, but they actually save money. If you give them to people, you can show them things they may be interested in, instead of telling them things they are sure they already know. If you advertise on them, you can show people pictures, not words. And if you give them to people, they won't have to look at a menu more than once. Digital menus aren't just for restaurants. At a conference, I gave one to a waiter who had trouble finding my table. I showed him pictures, and in a few minutes he had the table ready. Digital menus in restaurants are just the beginning. You can use them for all kinds of things.
Create a single menu for your restaurant across all platforms or have 2 versions
Your menu is the first thing a customer will see about your business, so it should be your best. But instead of spending all your time designing new menus for each new medium, you can simply build a digital menu. Digital menus allow you to present your restaurant's menu in a consistent way across your website, mobile, tablet, and kiosks. And you can use the same menu on different platforms, so if you decide to change platforms, you don't lose half your customer base. To create a digital menu, start by building a website. Then, with responsive design, the same menu will appear on all devices. After that, create an app for the Apple App Store and Google Play. You also have the option of creating a kiosk version with Orda. The kiosk version lets you let customers order or pay without an internet connection, which can be useful at busy times. And, of course, the kiosk version can be updated in real time. Once you've got a digital menu, you'll be able to serve your customers better. You'll be able to let them order and pay for what they want, and you'll be able to see your order history. Your customers will appreciate the consistency, and your business will reap the benefits.
Post pictures of the food
A picture is worth a thousand words. The ideas in a menu are worth about the same. The better a picture, the more ideas it can convey, and the more ideas a menu conveys, the more useful it is. Restaurants aren't the only business that can use digital menus. A digital menu lets you convey more ideas, not just more words. Pictures and graphics let you combine several ideas into one, to express them all at once, and show the relationships between them. Your menu should be crammed with ideas. Your guests want to know everything about your food, while they're deciding what to eat. And they want to be inspired while they're looking at the menu, while they're making their food selections. And when they take pictures of your food, you want them to show why your restaurant was the best dining experience they've ever had.
Add a call to action button for customers to purchase food online
At your restaurant, you can display a digital menu to help inform your customers about healthy and nutritional food. You can also display a call to action button for customers to purchase food online. Customers will be inclined to buy food online when they feel pressured to order fast and when they are hungry. Through this strategy, you can increase your sales, making it easy for your customers to order food at the last minute or when they are hungry. Displaying a call to action button on your menu makes it easier for customers to order food online. When there is a call to action button on your menu, customers can order food at the last minute. This makes it easier to catch late-night and late-afternoon orders. While customers are already in the store ordering food, they are thinking about what to choose. By scanning the call to action buttons on the menu screen, you can give them the opportunity to order food online in your store.
When you go to a restaurant, what's the first thing you do? You look at the menu. What kinds of things do you want to order? Do you spend a long time choosing, or do you scan the list quickly, stopping at things you know are good? People tend to scan. They don't need to look at every dish on the menu. In fact, they probably know, from past experience, that about 50 percent of the menu will not turn out to be tasty. So restaurants have made it easy to scan by using digital menus. Visit Orda for an easy way to design your digital menu.
