Digital menus are invaluable assets for business; both customers and staff can benefit. From providing visuals of products to promoting special offers, digital menus can enhance a customer’s overall experience.
While we have written extensively about the advantages of digital menu boards, this guide demonstrates just how straightforward the process can be to get content displayed on screens.
We will cover: Whilst creating an effective menu board design is a straightforward process, how it should appear on TV screens for restaurants or cafes may require more preparation before scheduling different menu boards for various seatings of their restaurant or cafe can be more complex. We will discuss: Whilst creating a menu board design easily and how it should appear there will also be plenty of tips provided on scheduling multiple menu boards to cater for different sittings within their restaurant or cafe
And for more ideas and inspiration, see how Smoky Boys utilized ScreenCloud to attract customers to their restaurant pop up.
Experienced Restaurant or Cafe Servicii
Nothing ruins the dining experience like hearing “we have unfortunately run out of…” after spending 10 minutes selecting items off a menu, while for servers repeating special offers and dishes can take time away from service delivery. Creating a TV menu board could save your restaurant or cafe both time and energy when creating their TV menu board for customers to use at your restaurant or cafe.
Digital menus offer the solution to both of these pain points and more, while franchise owners should check out our guide about digital signage for franchises.
Digital Menu Board Benefits Digital menu boards allow restaurants to easily change content by entering new items or removing older ones with just a click or two – perfect if a dish runs out as it allows quick removal from all screens in just seconds!
Digital menu boards provide a way for restaurants to display restaurant favorites while delving deeper into ingredients or preparation methods. If there’s a special offer or promotion going on, this content can also be scheduled automatically at certain times or days without having to manually update anything.
How to create your own restaurant TV menu
Your Own Design Software
If you want to design a menu from scratch (or replicate an existing printed menu design), design tools such as Photoshop, Indesign or You have two options when it comes to designing digital menu boards with ScreenCloud: Canvas and Digital Menu Board App.
Canvas is an intuitive design editor tool for quickly creating screen-ready content on ScreenCloud, making it one of the most used apps. Need inspiration? ScreenCloud offers preloaded templates as a starting point.
Digital menu board app
If you prefer not using design tools, or lack design experience, ScreenCloud’s Digital Menu Board software makes creating restaurant menus simple.
Utilizing our Digital Menu Board app offers numerous advantages: it comes equipped with templates to quickly lay out a digital menu board; plus it’s linked up with ScreenCloud so you can manage content on screen easily.
When changing products, ScreenCloud makes the process quick and easy: simply edit your template and watch as information on-screen changes instantly.
DSMENU App – 199 Restaurant Templates
DSMenu makes creating and managing menu boards from the cloud easy, offering hundreds of designs like grilling, fast food, pizza delivery, hamburger, beverages, festivals snacks offers, snacks/offers etc! Plus our user guide takes you step-by-step through getting set up.
Once you select one of 199 menu board templates or create one from scratch, our fully customizable menu boards allow you to add your own menu items, change colors and upload images.
Once satisfied with your masterpiece, download it as either a PNG or JPEG file, or get its unique URL and import into ScreenCloud to begin showing outstanding digital menu boards onto screens.
How to Display Your Digital Menu Screen
Now that you have both a menu and screen in place, all that remains is finding an effective means of connecting them both.
1. Integrate Your Screens With ScreenCloud
Assuming you’re new to digital signage, one of your first tasks should be connecting your screens to ScreenCloud accounts. Watch this quick video below on how to connect them.
If your TV doesn’t support smart technology, all it takes to get ScreenCloud onto it is investing in an inexpensive media device such as an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K (roughly $40) or Chromecast with Google TV (around $50), plug it into an HDMI port on the back, and plug it into our Hardware Selector Tool to find out which media device would best fit for your restaurant’s screens.
2. Develop or upload your restaurant menu
Once your screens are connected, you can begin designing digital menus. If you already have something ready-made outside, just upload it by selecting Media > Upload in the Media Menus module.
Now you can easily upload files from wherever they’re stored – your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive. ScreenCloud supports most file formats including JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs and SVGs as well as PDFs and Office/iWorks formats – making uploading content simpler than ever!
At any point you need to make adjustments or update your restaurant menu, upload an image or make your changes within Canvas or Menu Board app – this will instantly change what’s being displayed on screens across your company.
If you have multiple screens in different locations that are connected to one ScreenCloud account, any changes made will reflect across them all – making it simple and efficient for managing all of your restaurant TV screens from a single system.
3. Schedule Menu Boards for Your Restaurant Once your menus have been designed and uploaded to ScreenCloud Media Library, they will be visible for viewing by restaurant management.
Create menus covering breakfast through dinner with special happy hours or meal deals and save them to a Playlist before placing them on your screen.
Since you don’t want your breakfast menu showing during dinner service and vice versa, or cocktails during breakfast service, you can set which content appears when.
Click into the menu you wish to schedule and then Enable availability, which allows you to set the date and time you would like this content displayed on your screen. This makes scheduling time-sensitive promotions easy without needing to manually remember when to change things up or down!
