Digital Signage Menus: Your Secret Weapon to Increase Fast Food Sales

The fast food industry has seen a growing reliance on digital signage. Digital signage is quickly replacing traditional signs at drive-thrus, take-out windows, and traditional menus for dine-in facilities. 

In fast food environments, digital signage has a positive impact on consumer behavior by providing quick opportunities for payment processing while also connecting consumers to information about new products and discounts for items they already love.

But how can you use the secret weapon to increase your fast food sales?

Designing Effective Digital Signage Menu Boards to Increase Fast Food Sales

Below are six tips for optimizing the best digital signage menus. 

‍

1. Structuring menu categories and items

The first thing you want to do is ensure that your menus are structured into proper categories for easy navigation and decision-making. For example, you want different categories for things like:

• Entrees
• Side dishes
• Drinks 

Or

• Pastas
• Pizzas
• Sandwiches 
• Salads
• Desserts

Or even:

• Vegan
• Vegetarian
• Gluten-free

‍

2. Emphasizing the right things

No matter how great your menu is, you don't want to emphasize everything. The right digital menu signage will emphasize things like:

• Bestsellers, which you can flag with text bubbles that showcase social media reviews or customer comments
• New items
• Limited-time offers, which can have their own category 

‍

3. Optimizing readability

No matter what you are trying to emphasize or how well-organized your menu categories are, none of it will matter if you have an optimized readability. This extends to choosing the right:

• Styles
• Fonts
• Sizes
• Colors

Don't overcrowd the menu. Keep things simple and maximize white space to draw attention to the most important text. 

‍

4. Ensuring proper contrast and visibility across different viewing distances

You want to ensure that you have proper contrast and visibility for different viewing distances. Not all customers will be able to read the entire menu when they first walk through the doors but from an appreciable distance, they should be able to see things like limited-time offers or the text listing different categories of food. As they get closer to the digital signage, things like dishes, ingredients, and prices should become clearer. 

‍

5. Maintaining brand consistency 

As you incorporate digital signage menu board options, be sure to maintain brand consistency through colors, logos, and imagery. 

For example, if you have a well-known brand logo, it doesn't have to be the main feature on your digital menus but it should be something in a corner or as a watermark across all the digital screens for each location you have. Much the same, focus on colors that have to do with your brand in order to maintain brand consistency.

Tip: If your brand has turquoise and black as the main colors, turquoise might not be a text color that's easily readable, but it could be something incorporated into smaller graphics. 

‍

6. Creating a cohesive and appealing visual identity across digital menu boards

When designing a digital signage menu board, if you have multiple screens lined next to one another, they should have a cohesive design to make it look as though they flow seamlessly into one another. 

You do not want your digital menu signage to look broken and disjointed, with different themes or backgrounds across each screen. This can crowd the aesthetics of the display and make it more confusing for customers. 

Maximizing the Impact of Digital Signage Menus

In order to maximize the impact of your digital signage menu, you need to ensure the menus are placed in a strategic location, have integration for making orders and taking payment, and have targeted promotions. 

‍

Strategic Placement and Visibility

Consider having kiosks with digital signage near a door or entrance but not immediately in front. It should be placed off to the side, along a wall, or along a half-wall so that people do not end up crowding the entrance/exit trying to wait in line for the next open kiosk. 

Tip: If your signage is designed just to provide visibility for menu options for customers before they place an order, install the signs overhead so customers can stand back from the counter, read the menu, and then approach the counter when they are ready. 

‍

Integration with Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems

Having structured menus with the right visibility on your digital signage menus is a great way to ensure customers know what they want to order. But you want to capitalize on that desire by making it easy to place an order and pay for it with a point-of-sale system. 

Attaching a POS to your signage enables customers to pay with a card or their smartphones. 

Tip: If you are integrating the digital signage so that customers can place orders, consider having each kiosk contain a menu on both sides or be centralized on a column with four menus per side. 

‍

Personalization and Targeted Promotions

Consider installing personalized and targeted promotions. For example:

If you have a POS system, while a customer looks at a menu, add things to their cart, but before they pay, have a screen that pops up with discounts or promos based on the items in their carts or suggested items based on foods they viewed but didn’t add. 

If a customer orders a burger with fries, have a page that offers additional sides with a discount, like two-for-one or 50% off if they pick from potato wedges, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, mashed potatoes, or green beans.

Boosting Your Sales with Digital Signage Menus

There are several benefits to implementing digital signage menus in fast food restaurants. However, it's important that you ensure you have well-structured menu categories and that you emphasize things like limited-time offers with the right colors and styles. Implementing proper contrast and visibility no matter the distance can help you embrace digital menu boards as a powerful tool for increasing sales and enhancing customer experiences.

‍