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How can food photos on a restaurant's site impact sales? —Robert K., St. Louis
We’ve all been there: Perusing a menu, menu board, or online portal—then quickly becoming glassy-eyed, completely clueless regarding what to order. The more unfamiliar the cuisine or menu items, the worse the affliction.
This fact has not been lost on restaurant owners and menu designers—the savvy ones, anyway.
For decades, menu “engineers” have studied the effects of both strategically placed text (highlighted, emboldened, in separate boxes) and photos. They've proven that such cues can help drive sales to a particular item, whether it’s a high-profit dish, a promotional offering, a traditionally slow seller, or a chef’s special.
Today, with the increased popularity of platforms such as Instagram and TikTok (as well as Twitter and Facebook, to some extent), visual stimuli continue to rise in importance. In the past few years, as more patrons continue to venture online to select restaurants and place orders, visual marketing has never been more important. And the effect is universal because enticing images can help negate any language barriers that might exist.
Justin Wells, director of sales at DCRS Solutions, a local point of sale, payment, and IT solutions company, compiled the following proprietary statistics corroborating this trend:
- Restaurants' digital orders are growing by 23 percent annually, while phone-in orders are trending down nationally.
- Average spend is 18 percent higher when ordering online compared to phone orders.
- Online ordering customers visit the business 67 percent more than phone order or walk-in customers.
Most germane to this discussion was that “merchants with high-quality online photos averaged 31.5K in processing monthly, compared to 4.9K for merchants without photos—or five times higher volume, on average.”
Of note is the reference to “high-quality.” As any rookie Instagrammer knows, taking fetching food photos is not as easy as it seems. We contend that given the nuances involved with food photography—lighting, composition, shading, styling—money spent on high-resolution photos is well worth the investment, especially considering that the photos can be repurposed in multiple ways: in house (on physical menus or video boards), online (both on the website and on ordering portals), as well as in online/print promotions. In short, the coveted, “I want that…now!” response is better achieved by hiring a professional than uploading an amateur’s cell phone images.
Mike Kupstas, president and CEO of Lion’s Choice, largely concurs. “Spending the time and dollars to depict your products in an appetizing way is critical,” he says, “especially for brands in our segment, as channels of distribution have shifted to more delivery and online ordering. Today’s customer correlates pictures with their ordering, especially the new or infrequent ones, so at Lion’s Choice, we rephotographed every one of our products over the last couple of years as we converted to digital menu boards, updated our website, and introduced the new LC App."
He adds, “Several of our followers prefer to see real food in real locations, as opposed to beauty shots that look like polished advertisements. So we’ve also discovered that a less perfect, more 'organic' photo can serve social media better.”
Follow dining editor George Mahe on Twitter and Instagram, or send him an "Ask George" email at gmahe@stlmag.com. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
