Is your menu a ‘sad little waste of ink and paper’?
Your online presence
Do you have a restaurant? And do you have a menu?
Of course, all restaurants need a menu.*
Whether you are fast food, greasy spoon, mid-market or high-end: you need to let the customer know what’s on offer.
Some places do this well. Some are so-so and some just have a list with ingredients and prices.
Nothing inspiring, nothing to get you excited about ordering. Just a sad little waste of ink and paper – and opportunity. A well-designed menu can make you money. Or save you from leaving money on the table.
But before we start on the physical menu, we need to look at something else first.
Customer journey in coming to your restaurant
To write your menu, you need to understand what marketing people call your customer journey. How do your potential customers know enough about you to want to come to visit?
Maybe they found you on social media, maybe a friend told them about you (on social media) or maybe they found you through searching. The days of randomly coming across a restaurant – or reading a review in a newspaper (what’s that?) Sunday supplement or other magazines are almost over.
Nearly 80% of customers will check you out online first. Restaurant Survey
So, they go to your website or social media – maybe both.
And an alarming 87% will check out your online reviews (even more in the US). Diner choice decision
Don’t worry too much about this. Unless you have many poor reviews, you’ll be fine. We all know how dodgy the online review system is, but we still read them anyway.
What does your customer need to know to decide to visit your restaurant?
What do they want? They don’t want to be bombarded with too much information and certainly not a pop-up 10 nanoseconds after landing on the page, asking you to book. Don’t go off on one about how passionate you are about your food (duh) and the life story of your head chef. That may come later. This is a first date, not a conversation about whether you want to have children.
Keep it simple. They want to know:
- Opening days and hours
- A bit about the food: a sample menu is fine
- Whether you cater for common special diets
- Roughly how much it costs
- How to book
- Where you are: make this easy – have a map. Do most customers drive to you? Can they park easily? Give them the low down.
That’s it. A mind-blowingly simple webpage with all these six bits of information is all a prospective customer wants.
Web designer show-offs and grandstanding
A few customers might want more – in which case make it easy to find this information or contact you – but the majority don’t want to be blindsided with all the guff they are not interested in. Pop-ups, carousels, drop-downs, unnecessary images – leave your web designer’s sensibilities to one side and make sure your website is not a grandstanding opportunity for you – but is designed for your customer.
When that is sorted, we can get on with planning the design of the physical menu in part two.
*OK, I know there are a handful of places where the chef cooks what he or she has found at the market that day. But they are rare.
Image: Parma ham taken in Parma, Italy.