We often get the question “How do digital menu boards work?”. At the most basic level a digital menu board is a video or image of a restaurant’s menu that is displayed on a screen.  The two most common ways this is done is using a digital signage player OR using the screen’s onboard software and a USB drive that contains the menu graphic.

How Do I Create A Digital Menu Board Design?

To create your menus, you can start from digital menu board templates that are included with some cloud based digital signage software platforms or use a 3rd party software product like Adobe Illustrator or Canva. These designs will typically be built at a resolution that matches your screens resolution (1080p or 4k). Digital menu boards screens can be mounted in a landscape or portrait configuration so it’s important to know that before designing your menu.

What Size Should My Digital Menu Board Design Be?

When designing digital menu boards, you will want to make sure your menu board takes up the whole screen. Since most screens being sold in 2024 are 4k, your design for a landscape screen will have a width of 3840px and a height of 2160px . If your screens are in a portrait orientation, you design should be 2160px wide and 3840px tall.

How Do I Use My TV As A Menu Board?

Once you have created your menu designs, you will use a digital signage player or a USB drive to display it. Most screens have the ability to detect a USB drive plugged into one of the ports on the back of the screen. You will need to export an image file for each screen you are looking to show your menu on and put each one on a separate USB drive. Typically this must be done outside of business hours and requires a someone onsite that can perform the update.

Using a digital signage player and cloud based digital signage software is an approach that involves a little more setup however updates are much easier and there are several other key benefits. A digital signage player is a small computer that runs dedicated software for displaying digital content on a screen. In most cases these digital signage players are mounted behind or near the screen and once installed, are rarely interacted with again. All content changes are performed from cloud based digital signage tools and sent to the player over the internet. Using a digital signage software provider like SmarterSign, users can create, edit and schedule their digital menu board designs right from their web browser without needing any additional design software.

Even if you are a small restaurant with a limited budget, using a dedicated digital signage player is a far better approach. We need to think about why we are using digital menu boards in the first place. Digital menu boards are much more than aesthetic upgrade for your restaurant.

How do digital menu boards work to drive sales?

When done properly, digital menus are a sales tool that can help you market more effectively to your customers at the different times that they are in your restaurant.  Day parting is when you show different menus at a different parts of the day.  This approach is typically used when restaurants have different breakfast, lunch and dinner offerings but it does not have to be limited to that. Most restaurant operators are going to be able to easily list which items sell the most of different parts of the day. However, you also might want to take into account which items on your menu might be more of a operational burden for your kitchen and take longer to make. Using your menu designs to help guide the customer behavior is one of the easiest ways to improve sales using digital menu boards.  For a full explanation, watch the video “Don’t Make This Digital Menu Board Mistake”

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“The Complete Guide
To Digital Menu Boards”

We share our 18 years of digital menu board expertise in this easy to understand guide. We walk you through everything involved with going digital so you can make informed decisions and avoid common mistakes.