Why scale your quick service restaurants with digital signage?
If you’ve ever considered installing digital signage in your quick service restaurants (QSRs), now could be just the time to revisit the idea. While both sides of the Atlantic might be experiencing an unwelcome rise in inflation, investing in digital signage can help to fight the impact, enabling you to streamline costs, avoid customer price increases, as well as maximise the in-location experience itself.
Reduce costs
Cloud-based digital signage platforms like Signagelive can reduce costs in both the short and long term.
Instead of having to spend time and money on constantly printing and updating menu boards and special promotions, you can create and schedule content in minutes as often as you require and from anywhere.
Whether you need to update menu options, pricing, or promotional information, you’re able to do so instantly, or use the advanced scheduling capabilities to display content on a recurring basis, or for specific dates, and time frames.
Change the menu according to the time of day, and ensure the seamless and timely transition of promotional offers for the morning, lunch and evening rush hours.
With playlists, you can cycle through more content, and create feature highlights and special offers on a wider selection of menu options to tempt regulars and first-time customers alike.
Getting started with digital menu boards doesn’t have to be cost-prohibitive, not when you have access to a whole host of free-to-use menu template designs through content management platforms, such as Signagelive.
The Signagelive Marketplace offers user-friendly content tools like the Menu board application, which pulls menu items, pricing, details and calorie information from your designated Google sheet straight onto whichever of its menu template designs you choose.
Streamline business operations at scale
CMS platforms, such as Signagelive offer entirely future-proof solutions, coming with enterprise-grade functionality to help streamline business operations as you grow.
Networks can be managed centrally and securely, with input from local franchise owners or specific territories.
With features, such as Granular User Permissions, you can allocate various levels of user access for the entire network, or for specific roles.
To save more time and resource, the in-built tag manager also lets you group players together and send out relevant updates, by, for example, region.
With Signagelive custom-built applications, larger franchises that may already have their own POS databases can also be sure that menu and pricing updates are automatically shared from these centralised systems, and displayed on-screen.
Boost customer loyalty and profit margins
To beat inflation and maximise profitability will, however, take more than maximising operational efficiencies; it will also require quick service restaurants to become increasingly agile, pro-active and creative in their approach to marketing.
Digital signage solutions, such as Signagelive can help, offering 500+ free-to-use and subscription- based content applications with which time-sensitive promotional offers are easy and cost-effective to create.
To keep customer prices down, you can afford to think outside the box, and create quick and transparent promotions for everything from smaller portion menu items to new spins on old menu favourites, which are made with alternative, lower cost ingredients.
With advanced CMS scheduling, QSRs are also able to react quickly to opportunities by, for example, advertising any leftover fresh foods or items coming to the end of their shelf life, which can be sold at tempting discounts.
Diversifying your business model to keep up with new trends and opportunities is just as easy. When you make a change to your customer service, or menus, with digital signage, you already have the platform to make your customer base immediately aware.
You can use your network to introduce – and explain your changes in as much detail as you need, and through eye-catching and dynamic content that resonates with customers. It’s the perfect platform to, for example, support the drive for healthy eating, and introduce alternative lower calorie count menu options.
Maximise and standardise the in-location experience
With digital signage, you can, in fact, transform your brand image, and ensure a much more uniform and consistent in-location experience across all your QSRs.
Through central management asset control, you and any number of authorised users on your team have more power to set the tone across all your locations, and manage everything from branding and promotions to menu styles and timely content updates.
With Local playlists, it’s quick and easy to re-use and add un-editable corporate branding and messaging to local franchisee playlists.
The menu boards themselves can double up as advertising, enabling you to promote your brand as well as the menu options you sell. Give your business an extra competitive advantage and more reasons for customers to come back by promoting your ethics, environmental policies and customer service.
Consider how a digital signage network could also be used for general marketing. High brightness window or front-of-house screens can be more effective than ad hoc local billboards, listings or directory advertising, enabling you to draw in passers-by, as well as tempt repeat customers in the area to come back with loyalty initiatives and offers.
You can also connect the in-location and online franchise experience to deliver a powerful, digitally enhanced customer service. Display QR promotional codes to enable customers to download your app, or to sign up for customer loyalty cards through your website.
As part of a long-term strategy, you could develop an even more integrated approach. If you have a transactional website from which customers are able to place orders, you can then use your screens to manage the in-location pick-ups by displaying which orders are ready to be collected at the counter.
Save more time and money with self-service touch-screen kiosks
Investing in self-service touch-screen kiosks can further overhaul and improve the customer experience, enabling you to slash waiting times, at the same time as reduce your dependence on costly part-time or temporary hires.
With touch-screen kiosks, orders can be placed in seconds with just a few touch interactions. And additional menu levers can help unobtrusively prompt customers to customise and add more items to their orders.
In Signagelive’s Kiosk mode, one swift touch interaction can instantly interrupt the placeholder advertising and trigger the launch of ready-to-order menu options.
Boost revenue streams with third-party advertising
While such touch screens are not in use, they are ideal platforms to display relevant third-party advertising. With integrated programmatic advertising platforms, such as HiveStack, Snapp and VistarMedia, Signagelive enables QSRs to monetise their networks, while also adding interest to their own content line-ups. Carefully selected advertising partners can enhance QSR reputations, offering popular brand associations that are often key to developing customer loyalty.
Increase profitability with AI-driven customer analytics
With AI-driven CMS solutions, you can access the data you need to maximise your return on investment. Integrated with vision AI audience and campaign intelligence platform, Quividi, Signagelive enables you to access anonymous customer data analytics to find out everything from who is visiting your QSRs to what menu items are your best-sellers.
You can also understand the impact of any on-screen special offers and promotions, simply by accessing proof of play reports from the Signagelive platform and checking these against sales.
Enhance the customer experience with experiential marketing
And finally, just because affordability is of the essence for most quick service restaurants, it doesn’t mean to say that you can’t incorporate experiential marketing into your overall strategy.
With Signagelive web triggers, you can create ultra-immersive food tasting showcases in flagship locations. Invite customers to lift open a container to sample some new menu choices, and Signagelive can automatically and unobtrusively display more information about these items on nearby screens to help deliver a high impact customer experience that hits all the senses.
No longer cost-prohibitive, digital signage can give quick service restaurants an extra competitive edge in even the toughest socio-economic conditions, helping to streamline operations at scale, as well as deliver a stand-out in-location experience.
