Interactive restaurant menus are one of the newest and most effective ways to attract new customers to your restaurant and remind regulars why they should come back again. If you own or manage a restaurant, or if you design web sites for restaurants, you’ll definitely want to make your online menus interactive.
What is an interactive menu?
An interactive restaurant menu looks just like the menu you already have on your web site, but when you move your mouse over an entrée — or touch it on a mobile device — a photograph of the food item appears. You can also display detailed text along with the photo to describe your tasty cuisine in mouth-watering detail that would take up too much space on the menu itself.
Drooling over food photos is human nature
Whenever I show an interactive menu to someone I hear the same response nearly every time: “Hmmm — that’s making me hungry!” It’s a scientific fact that people experience a physical sensation in response to a powerful visual signal that reminds them of something they really enjoy — food! So why not take advantage of human nature as part of your marketing efforts. There’s probably no other single thing you can do to improve your web site than to show what you have to offer with photographs.
How important is a restaurant web site?
Your restaurant’s web site is probably the number one way that people will learn where you are located, when you are open, if you have parking, what credit cards you accept, and oh yes, what kind of food you serve. Today, unless you are a big chain that can advertise in magazines and on TV, how else are people going to learn about the dining experience at your establishment?
There are of course other ways to advertise, some very effective and some that you probably should not be spending money on anymore. But there’s only one way that people can learn all about you and that’s the internet. People use their browser on their PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, or other mobile device when they want to learn about practically anything including where to eat. If your restaurant web site is not showing off your food properly, you could be losing business.
What about older folks who won’t see my web site?
Maybe your restaurant caters to an older crowd and you’re concerned that grandma and grandpa don’t surf the web. Well, my father-in-law is in his eighties and not only goes online and sends email, he calls me on Skype! And even if the grandparents are not tech savvy, you can bet that their kids and grandkids go online regularly and are looking for a restaurant just like yours that ma and pa will enjoy.
Make your restaurant web site unique
If there are other restaurants in your area that serve cuisine similar to yours, there’s a good chance that to an online visitor, your web menu looks pretty much like the next one. That is until a mouth-watering photo pops up and looks so real you can almost smell and taste it. When searching for a place to eat, if you could see photos of what you will be served wouldn’t that help make up your mind? It’s just another aspect of human nature – people tend to favor the sure bet and like to feel confident they are making the right choice. So why not make the menu on your web site display food photos?
Interactive menus sound expensive — are they?
If you have a tight marketing budget, and who doesn’t, you might be thinking that this is sounding like a good idea, but it’s probably too expensive. “I’ll need to hire a photographer, pay more money to my web designer, and how the heck does the interactive part happen and what does that cost?” These are legitimate concerns, so let’s examine them and discuss the options available to you.
Food photography
For the most effective interactive menu, you do need good photos that show off the recipes you work so hard to prepare. They shouldn’t be blurry, badly lit, or have clutter in the background because a poorly taken photograph could do more harm than good. Hiring a professional photographer will guarantee you great results and the cost of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars could be one of the best investments you can make. Keep in mind you can also use these photos for other advertising and promotion if you want.
If hiring a pro is not in your budget, find a friend that’s an advanced amateur photographer and ask if they could do the job for you. Offer them some free meals and buy them a few of the excellent books that have been written about food photography, especially the ones that explain how to shoot using natural light so that they don’t need studio lighting. Also get your own chef involved to style the food to make it look its best in each photograph.
Create an interactive menu and add it to your web site
You can create an interactive menu yourself in a few hours or have someone do it for you. Either way the steps are pretty straightforward. You upload an image of your menu (you can scan a paper menu or take a picture of it if you don’t have a digital version) and also upload your food photos. You then place hotspots on the menu that display a photo when you move your mouse over an entrée (or touch it on a mobile device). It’s not difficult and can be a lot of fun.
There are a couple of ways you can integrate your interactive menu with your web site. First, if you don’t have a web site at all, you can simply use the interactive menu itself as your site. If you have a web site, an easy option is to add a link so the menu appears in another browser window when the link is clicked. An even better approach is to display the menu within one of your web pages. Chances are that the way you are now displaying your current menu can be adapted to work with an interactive menu, minimizing the cost of changing your web site.
Consider reallocating your marketing budget
Take a hard look at the different ways you currently spend your marketing dollars and then ask yourself if you are getting your money’s worth from each expenditure. One place that restaurant owners spend a lot of money is advertising in the yellow pages. Ask yourself and your friends this question: how often do you turn to the yellow pages to find a business? Polls have shown that for most people today the answer is “never.” The internet has changed the way people locate businesses and some forms of advertising are no longer worth what they once were. Perhaps some of the money you are spending would yield better results if invested in your web site and in driving traffic to your site.
Let your photos draw people to your door
Where you do use more traditional advertising, think about changing its purpose from getting people in your door to driving traffic to your web site. Do everything you can to promote your web site’s URL. Put it in your ads, on your signage, on your doggy bags, even on your cash register receipts. Each of these little things drives more traffic to your web site and once people get there, your food photos will do the job of getting them to visit you in person.
George Soules is the President and co-founder of AvantLogic Corporation, makers of MapsAlive.
MapsAlive is a web application that makes it easy to create interactive restaurant menus for your web site. To learn more about MapsAlive visit our website at http://www.mapsalive.com.
To try working examples of interactive restaurant menus created with MapsAlive and to see a step-by-step tutorial on how to create one, visit http://www.mapsalive.com/LearningCenter/RestaurantMenus.aspx.