Your restaurant’s menu is the first point of interaction for your customers, even before the waiter. Therefore, it’s imperative that your menu leaves the best first impression on the diners’ minds.
How restaurant menus impact marketing
The menu is a tangible component of the overall dining experience. It’s the first peek into what service and level of quality to expect. In the digital age, with more people using the internet to search for good restaurants, providing an online version of your menu has become equally important. If menus were simply a “list of food you can choose at a restaurant,” you would have standard printed lists at all restaurants. You wouldn't have searched for this article or spent time reading it.
A properly designed menu not only lets people know of the cuisine offered by the restaurant but can stimulate appetite and aid in making choices. It can also act as a silent but powerful advertising tool that establishes the restaurant’s identity in the market. Branding is an essential tool for marketing, and even the hospitality industry knows its influence on their businesses.
Features of an effective menu design
A few features that render restaurant menus effective are:
● Easy-on-the-eye design, with or without the use of templates
● Clearly communicates costs and marketing objectives
● Emphasizes crowd favorites while also mentioning the best and signature dishes of the restaurant
● Facilitates client-to-kitchen-to-table liaison for the servers with any miscommunication
● Helps in forecasting sales and marketing.
As mentioned above, your menu could very well be the deciding factor for your client to dine at your restaurant.
7 Reasons why you need a professional designer to create your restaurant menu
Menus must fulfill customers' requirements by clearly stating the following:
● The dishes
● The ingredients (for allergies)
● The preparation style
At the same time, the restaurant menu must captivate the person reading it. You cannot underestimate the power of an attractive and well-designed restaurant menu. Professional designers definitely don't, so hire one to design yours.
1) Free menu templates, the first step for professionals and beginners
An entrepreneur’s understanding of design may be limited. If you were to sit and create a menu, would you know where to start? Which elements to include? Where to find help? Designers, specifically those who create restaurant menus, already have their resources in check.
They’ve access to the best software. However, beginners, amateurs, and daring entrepreneurs use high-quality templates to save time. If you check out Lightspeed’s free menu template collection, you'll see how brilliantly done they are. Beginners and professional designers don’t shy away from using them if that means the end product will come out much better than they imagined.
2) Designers understand psychology
It's a known secret that psychology highly influences marketing. For restaurants, understanding and implementing a few psychological hacks have proven to be successful in driving sales and demand. Designers know how the first impressions of a nicely crafted restaurant menu can immediately convince a customer to place an order without wasting time.
The right color scheme, layout, font, and many more elements do influence a customer’s buying preferences. A designer can help you nail the syntax of influencing your consumer. These are minor and unnoticed yet powerful tricks that designers know how and when to use. You must never underestimate the impact of menu engineering.
3) Designers know the connection between colors and feelings
We know how boring a black-and-white world would be. Colors affect our emotions subconsciously, and that’s why everything from a job interview to an advertisement banner is governed by color theory. Similarly, designers know the opportunities they have when they use suitable colors while designing restaurant menus.
There’s a reason why most of us associate McDonald’s with their double arch. The color red stimulates appetite and invigors us to act. Likewise, the color yellow is associated with happiness. McDonald's has used these colors for years and has been popular with the masses worldwide. So when you get a designer to create your restaurant menu, they will know which colors resonate with your brand and add more personality to the menu.
4) They use the best descriptions
The heart of a menu lies in the names and descriptions of the food items at the restaurant. Descriptions are the information based on which most diners place their orders. Designers go the extra mile by coming up with appealing and “salivating” food descriptions. With external help from copywriters, of course.
Another fantastic hack that designers and copywriters know is including unique words that evoke feelings of nostalgia and/or sensory terms in food descriptions. For example, read “chicken curry” and “homestyle chicken curry” - isn’t it obvious the one you’ll choose? Well-crafted and mouthwatering dish descriptions and titles are rewarding, so better to invest in a professional designer who knows what’s expected of them.
5) Designers create aesthetic layouts
Over the years, experts have studied how layouts affect order choices among customers. Furthermore, reading patterns shouldn’t be ignored. Designers clearly know where readers will first focus while scanning through the menu. Therefore, you need to create aesthetically pleasing layouts for your menu card.
The hospitality industry is familiar with the “sweet spot” on menus. It’s usually the upper right-hand corner of the menu that diners naturally gravitate towards. Instead of an illustration there, designers know which typography to use to feature the signature or the most expensive dish on the menu. This sweet spot can change based on the layout you choose, but they all have their benefits.
6) Designers can place more emphasis on certain food items
Restaurants have a few dishes they want to act as eye magnets. These may be their signature or pricey dishes, but bringing attention to them can take time and effort. Enter in a designer who knows exactly how to do that. It could be a photograph, a border, or a box in different shades.
Designers understand the restaurant’s image and use related elements on the eye-magnet food items. For example, they may create a rustic frame around those dishes for restaurants backed by a rich legacy. Or use color psychology by drawing a red-colored box around.
7) Designers know their way around prices
Last but not least, the trickiest part of designing a restaurant menu is deciding what to do and where to place prices. It’s challenging to strike that balance between profiting the business and not deterring the customers. If the first thought that comes to mind while ordering is the cost, then most customers are bound to make choices solely based on that.
Since designers are familiar with users’ mentality, they know how to position prices on the menu. Few don’t use the dollar sign as it doesn’t throw off the customer immediately and may get them to spend more. Few use the tactic of using a lighter shade for the price, so it doesn't hold much prominence on the menu. Food prices are one element of restaurant menu design that takes years of research. You’ll find yourself passing the menu an evening, observing which price tactic works the best for your restaurant.
Takeaways from your à la carte design
You could be the new restaurant on the block or one that has existed for decades, but it’s time you consider your menu as a communication channel between you and your customers. “Forage” for the best professional designers and hire them fast. Then, “cook up” a menu design that’s up to standards. It isn't fair to control your customers’ food preferences, but if you can guide them in a way that benefits both parties, then no harm in taking that path.
By B Naomi Grace