Digital Signage – Not the One-Size-Fits-All Solution in Boosting ROI

Even though digital signage is believed to have successes in boosting restaurant business, factors such as menu board contents and designs, quality of images being displayed, special promotional items being advertised, day-part menus being targeted towards different customers, and other marketing strategies being utilized all have significant effect on restaurant’s success.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the failure to adopt digital signage will place businesses at a competitive disadvantage as 90% retail businesses will have installed digital signage networks by 2011. However, Digital Signage shouldn’t be treated as the one-size-fits-all solution to guarantee increase in business ROI (return on investment). There are countless other factors that may affect the success of your business.

Let’s take the restaurant food industry for example, everything from the type and quality of food served, size and location of the business, style of interior design, variety of menu items, presentation of menu items served, quality of customer services, proximity of other similar restaurants nearby, overall feel of the establishment, creativity marketing strategies, as well as local community demographics can all have dramatic effects on the success of a restaurant business.

In addition, even though digital signage is believed to have successes in boosting restaurant business, factors such as menu board contents and designs, quality of images being displayed, special promotional items being advertised, day-part menus being targeted towards different customers, and other marketing strategies being utilized all have significant effect on restaurant’s success.

It is important to make the most of the advantages of digital signage applications. For example, rather than playing one or few static images on each digital signage display, restaurant owner should apply day-parting strategy to display breakfast, lunch, ad dinner menu at different times of the day, and offer different promotions during these different time segments. Moreover, besides rotating plain images, restaurant owners should take advantage of digital menu board for displaying dynamic advertisements and keep customers entertained. Some advantages include increase in customer loyalty, shorten perceived wait time, improve dining experiences…etc.

Some of the above points are why cafes are turning to digital menu boards, irrelevant of business size. One excellent example is a part of a well known food brand including KFC, who plan on adding calorific information to their menu boards in its company owned cafes, as well as encouraging franchise owners to do the same.

Thus, those who claimed that the installation of digital signage will automatically boost business sales without mentioning other related factors are irresponsible and misleading. It is suggested that restaurant owners should conduct through research and take all these factors into consideration in order to strengthen their business, retain customer loyalty, and increase ROI.