Digital Menus – The Key to Elevating Your Brand in 2023
One of the main technologies helping the hospitality industry today is digital menus. Digital menus help your restaurant score big with benefits ranging from social media engagement and on the fly updates to flexible, more personal gifting to boost your gift card, customer loyalty, and guest retention programs. With a host of seamless add-ons, digital menus become as flexible as you need them to be in order to stay adaptable through inflation and staff changes while also meeting this year’s revenue goals.
If that wasn’t enough, digital menus launch your business to the top of the industry to both retain talent and delight guests. Here’s how:
Activate Your Social Network
You only have seconds to capture people’s attention, and in today’s noisy world, it’s becoming harder than ever to make them count. Digital menus change that.
Instantly Updated, Easily Shareable Menus
Digital menu programs such as BYOM streamline your marketing and get people talking. With features such as mobile-friendly formats and instant updates, guests and staff alike benefit from the seamless workflow.
Whether you need to update pricing to keep your margins or announce a last minute special to avoid food waste, digital menus give you the flexibility you need to keep your social network well-informed without extra effort from your team.
Holidays and events coming up? Digital menus are fast and flexible for the ever changing restaurant industry. Easily add holiday and event information, complete with engaging images to draw guests in.
Plus, your menu can be shared from one user to another via built-in sharing capabilities, empowering your followers to spread the word in real time. Maximize this feature by sharing your live menus in emails, on your website, through reservation texts, and more.
Effortless User-Generated Content
Influencer-ready, Instagram worthy pictures every time. Your guests already love capturing special memories, and your restaurant creates a lot of them!
Rather than being known by guest pictures of half-eaten food, Restaurant Memories helps you manage your online reputation by making it easy for guests to share branded images of their experience. A simple post on social media or sharing through other outlets boosts brand awareness and provides a memento for your guests to keep of their experience.
Images, Descriptions + Menu Design
Not only are digital menus easy to use, but they can be designed to look like a real menu (not a piece of technology). The menu look maintains the dining ambiance that guests know and love, while enhanced features such as enticing images and informative descriptions encourage upselling and provide an overall enhanced guest experience.
Guests will never be left wondering what their order will look like because a beautiful image of the dish is provided. They can skip Yelp and Instagram for their inside look and go straight to the source!
As sales go up, so do server gratuities. The benefits of digital menus go beyond guest experience and operations to include attracting and retaining talent as well. In today’s market, digital menus are a competitive advantage on multiple fronts.
Elevate The Guest Experience With Add-ons
Today’s digital menus also offer add-ons to further round out your restaurant’s guest experience technology. Elevate the guest experience with add-ons such as:
Virtual Gifting
A great addition to any digital menu is virtual gifting. Guests will enjoy this new way of giving gifts and it helps bring in more revenue for the restaurant. Features such as custom video messages and augmented reality present opening experiences help to make these new virtual gift cards a truly special gift. You can put fun bundles together, such as birthday celebrations, girls’ night out packages, wine pairing experiences, tee times from your on-site golf club and more. This not only elevates your brand in big ways, but it’s an amazing way to help showcase gifting in a new light.
Better than the typical online or eGift card, virtual gifting is a new sustainable and personal way to give a custom gift. It provides an experience that plastic gift cards can’t offer and it’s something different for the consumer to enjoy. Add it to your menu and incorporate it as a part of your loyalty program—there are so many different ways to utilize digital gifting!
Virtual Wine Lockers
Maximize restaurant revenue by expanding wine locker programs beyond physical front-of-house capacity!
When guests have personal wine lockers, they have a strong connection to your restaurant. Virtual wine lockers give a sense of belonging and prestige, and they boost guest engagement as guests have a tangible reason to frequent your location.
Offering virtual wine lockers on their own or in addition to traditional physical lockers helps to keep customers updated 24/7. Not only is your team given an easier way to log locker activity, but your guests can also see the contents of their locker at any time while sharing comments with fellow locker holders and sending gifts to friends and family. The ability to quickly build a custom wine locker encourages more frequent visits, and it adds to the experiential component of your wine program.
Tablet menu rollouts are a great way to take your restaurant’s brand to whole new heights. These programs are budget-flexible: Go fully digital or start with just online menus, add the gift card integration to add a new revenue stream to your social media profiles, and introduce tablet menus in increments to fit your needs. Financing options such as leasing and vendor support are also often available for restaurants to enjoy the benefits of tablet menus without a large upfront cost.
Curious to learn more about the best digital menu program for your restaurant? Our team of experts is well-versed in hybrid and fully digital programs and is happy to help. Contact us today to see the difference using digital menus will make for your brand:
