Your menu is your best marketing asset. Some restaurants however perceive their menu to simply be a list of products detailing the basic ingredients used to prepare the dish. Top-notch restaurant menus with intriguing product descriptions and enticing pictures can bring so much more value to your eatery.
When designing a menu to ultimately lead to increased ordering revenue, remember that this piece of marketing material is the first impression you make with your customers. Your menu should portray your restaurant’s personality, tone, and style and essentially lead to building customer trust and increasing customer retention – profits with follow.
Product descriptions in your menu play a vital role in enhancing customer experience, evoking emotion and building long-lasting guest relationships. Make sure your descriptions are designed to engage with your customer’s senses and accurately convey the quality of food. Have your descriptions leave guests salivating and eagerly anticipating their meal!
Food description can trigger an increase in buying decisions by 45%. The best menus that capture the attention of guests are those that provide clear information on their products and are optimized for mobile viewing and easy user navigation.
The ever-changing restaurant landscape
Remember the days when you’d only have 5 restaurants to choose from? Today, consumers are overwhelmed with choice and it’s safe to say that the competition has never been fiercer. This is why you need to step ahead of your competition and write unique menu descriptions that paint a picture of what your dish could taste like and the quality it delivers.
Increase restaurant sales
According to a study, a well-crafted food description can boost sales, and increase profits by 30%. This is because strong menu item descriptions can fuel appetites and enhance your guests’ dining experience, encouraging larger orders and bigger check sizes. Your food descriptions are also a differentiator from your competition and are useful when justifying pricing.
Talk about appearance, texture, taste and cooking techniques
Which sounds more appealing?
Pulled chicken burger roasted chicken, coleslaw, bbq sauce, bun
OR
Succulent Pulled Chicken Burger Slow cooked, hand-pulled chicken meat piled high in a fresh brioche bun, topped with zesty coleslaw and a dollop of Jenny’s special BBQ sauce.
Now did that get you hungry? Use the power of words to tempt and entice your customers, get their salivary glands working and their imagination running riot. The following are some adjectives most frequently used to engage guests’ senses and practically have them tasting the food.
Drinks can be chilled, delicious, tangy or aromatic
Meat can be tender, succulent, juicy, slow-roasted, smoky or spicy
Vegetables can be fresh, zesty, vibrant, organic or local
Desserts can be creamy, decadent, yummy, velvety or caramelized
Starting to get the gist? But remember, an ideal description is one that is short yet effective, you don’t need an adjective for each word, just focus on the ones that add most value to your dish. Try to stay away from the never-ending, perplexing, mumbo-jumbo of jargon-fill food descriptions that leaves customer confused, because once you win a guest over for the first time, the chances of them becoming repeat customers are 60-70%.
Incorporate storytelling into your menu
Create a nostalgic backstory for your menu items that resonates with your customers and depicts past experiences, this is likely to help you increase conversion rates by 55%.
Identify recipes that have an interesting history, or have been passed down for generations, maybe it was an accidental sauce mix that turned out to be your signature sauce. However, remember to limit the number of backstory dishes to a minimum of three – you don’t want to overuse its power.
You can also include your food items geographic location to add more merit to the dish and make it sound more exclusive. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to opt for French onion soup opposed to onion soup or, Red Wine from Tuscany vs. Red wine?
Add visually enticing imagery
Use the power of pictures to compliment your food descriptions. You’ve heard it before: ‘people eat with their eyes’, a staggering 82% of people buy a dish because of how it looks in a picture and some restaurants have even increased their conversions by 25% after adding images next to the items on their menu. Click here for more information.
Optimized digital menu for mobile
With the estimated value of mobile ordering at $38 billion in 2020, it’s vital that restaurants offer digital menus that are optimized and mobile-friendly, especially when catering to post-pandemic norms that still continue to drive online ordering and pick-up’s. And even if you’re now offering in-dining to customers, a digital menu allows guests to view the menu from the safety of their personal devices.
But, when we say digital menus, we’re not talking about non-interactive PDF menus that are pretty much impossible to view on a mobile device without ending up in a state of frustration. We’re referring to digital QR code menus, adaptable to the nature of small mobile screens and designed for easy navigation. This also includes creating categories that best describes your products, such as Appetizers, Italian, Burgers or Desserts – so customers can access various categories with just one click, without having to scroll through your entire menu.
Looking for a FREE Online Digital Menu that supports product descriptions, is mobile-friendly and does all of the above?
Stand out and cut through the clutter with Applova FREE Digital Menu’s easy-to-access and user-friendly interface that allows you to create, customize and update your digital menu in minutes. Customize your branding to reflect your restaurants tone and style, swap backgrounds, select color themes and even upload your own logo.
Add and edit product descriptions and upload images of each dish or beverage. Applova’s dynamic QR code also allows for real-time price updates and menu item availability or substitutions, so your customers will always have access to accurate and current information.
Applova Free Digital Menu is FREE FOREVER. So what are you waiting for? Entice your customers with mouth-watering food descriptions to bolster sales turnover, increase customer engagement and go next-level digital!
Check out a sample menu here and sign up now!