Advanced Interactive Demo Building Tips from Demo Experts

You’ve built your first few demos, and they seem to be going well.

If you’re stuck on what to do next, keep reading. We asked our network of B2B SaaS marketing experts for their best demo building advice.

Some tips come from our demo building partners, demo consultants with diverse marketing backgrounds, and extensive experience with Navattic. The rest come from our outstanding customers who participated in our customer interview series.

Below, we share seven simple yet effective methods to take your demos to the next level.

Follow these suggestions from Navattic customers and demo building partners to build memorable demos that make a lasting impression on your prospects, customers, and internal staff.

Way #1: Create use case or persona-specific demos

One of our demo building partners, Megan Pratt from Product Marketing House, advises Navattic admins to build their demos around common use cases your ideal customer encounters every day.

“This allows you to create experiences that feel personal to your customers and gives you more opportunities to showcase what makes your product different from the competition."

To better understand what use cases your audience might be interested in, ask for feedback from other teams across the organization who get exposure to prospects and customers.

Tara Quehl, Product Marketing Director at Demandbase, reminds us,

“These teams have insights that you may not. Ideally, you would incorporate all their knowledge into tours that showcase how your product supports every ICP use case.”

The good news is that you don’t have to make hundreds of individual demos — there are ways to showcase multiple use cases in one demo. You can use branching to direct users toward the demo they want to see most or provide a checklist so they can jump straight to the most relevant use case.

Or, if you do end up making several demos, consider forming a demo center. One of our recent blog posts details how and when to implement each method.

Way #2: Review Navattic Analytics for drop-off areas

So many things influence demo performance, from copy to format to length.

Sydney Lawson, Product Marketing Manager at Athennian, suggests diving into the backend of Navattic to hone in on areas for improvement:

“Using Navattic Analytics, we've been able to tweak these pages and tours to make sure that people are finishing the entire tour. We can easily see in Navattic Analytics where people are dropping off.”

Examining what’s happening in the user journey right before the drop-off and going through the demo yourself can help you diagnose any problems and steer your adjustments in the right direction.

With Navattic Analytics Dashboard, you can also study demos with the highest and lowest completion and conversion rates to understand what’s capturing and keeping your prospects’ attention.

Check out our 5 Ways to Get More out of Your Interactive Demo Data blog post for more analytics-focused tips.

Way #3: Focus on the positive outcomes your users will achieve

The number one thing prospects want to know is whether your product will make their lives easier.

As Navattic demo building partner, Jakub Suchy from All Things Demos, says,

“My #1 advice would be to focus on the positive outcomes of your product and make sure to highlight them in your interactive demo.”

He emphasizes, “This is especially important when you have an amazing product that has a lot of features, and you are struggling to decide what to highlight. I'd recommend highlighting the best possible outcome first.”

Knowing what those aha moments are and including them in your demo is key to grabbing prospects’ attention and pushing them to conversion.

Why? Because buyers are new to your product and don’t know it the way you do.

Connecting your demo users to the value of your product, not just its logical appeal, helps prospects understand how it could speed up their workflow, save them money, or delight their customers.

Another effective approach is to appeal to users’ problems. Showing how your product counteracts “loss,” “delay,” or “wasted time” is sure to pique a prospect’s interest.

Looking for more messaging pointers for your demo? Learn from a copywriting expert.

Way #4: Adjust the demo according to your specific goals

Create your demo with a purpose in mind.

Demos could be purely about educating prospects, or they could be funneling prospects down the funnel. Knowing what you want to get out of the demo before you build it ensures that it’s designed to meet your goals.

Navattic customer, CloudAlly, outlines their approach to creating demos in their blog post, 5 Steps to a Phenomenal Interactive Product Tour:

“What are the expectations of the stakeholders from the interactive product tour? Prioritize them.

Will they be used as a main CTA for your website visitors, a product guide, pre-sales demo, and/or for in-app onboarding?

For instance, you may want to start with a quick walkthrough tour, followed by pre-sales demos of complex flows, and then move on to product guides, regional location/industry-based tours, and perhaps white-label ones for partners/MSPs.”

It’s critical that demos vary in size, copy, and CTA, depending on where they sit in the funnel — you wouldn’t include a “Book a demo” CTA at the end of a sales enablement demo.

To guide you, we’ve put together several curated demo playbooks designed to support typical demo use cases, such as feature highlights, training, and conference booth displays.

Way #5: Don’t treat your demo like a how-to

Demos are not onboarding videos.

As Natalie Marcotullio, our Head of Growth and Operations, puts it, “Videos show users how to set up a product, whereas demos show the end state of an already-configured product or feature.

Demos are particularly good for giving your prospects more information about your product without making them sign up for anything.”

Demos need to drive home the value of the product by getting users to an aha moment as quickly as possible. And that means they should be concise.

Demo building partner, Jason Oakley from Productive PMM, explains,

“As a product marketer, it can often be tempting to demo every cool feature in your product. The problem is that it ends up feeling like more of a technical onboarding guide than a conversion asset.”

He goes on, “Instead, be specific about a key pain or job to be done in your product. Build a demo that shows someone ‘how’ your product delivers on that promise.”

Treating your demo like a story helps you wow prospects and get them familiar with your product’s main value prop(s) — before they even talk to sales.

Way #6: A/B test your demo CTAs

It’s tough to know exactly what prospects want to see — even if you shadow calls and gather team member input.

That’s why Navattic demo building partner, Michael Shearer from Shemash, recommends integrating your interactive demo into site testing.

“Have you been trying to drive people to "book a demo" or "learn more" with underwhelming results?

Run a split test on those CTAs, driving them to your interactive demos instead, and test the potential lift.

Now that you are (somewhat) beholden to GA4, you can build some nice funnel reporting, adding Navattic-related events to it and seeing how it influences the conversion path and rate."

With Navattic’s new embed events feature and native GA4 integration, you can determine where users engage most with Navattic demos in a typical user journey and the projects that lead to the most conversions.

Or try testing our different CTAs within the interactive demo. Aston Whiteling, Product Marketing Manager at Jellyfish recommends:

Include CTAs to wide range of relevant content. I view our tours as a kind of product-driven network linking our entire content portfolio. However our customers want to learn about our product, our tours are the highway that gets them there.

You can take it a step further and A/B test multiple variations of each of your demos to zero in on the features your audience cares about most.

And connecting Navattic to a personalization platform like Mutiny can help you tailor your website based on how far users get in a demo and retarget the highest-intent users with new CTAs or offers.

Learn 3 ways to use Navattic’s embed events feature.

Way #7: Use demos for internal enablement

Your GTM team needs to know the ins and outs of your product, but they aren’t in it as much as product and customer success team members are.

Interactive demos are a fantastic way to train them on new features or get new hires up to speed.

Navattic customer, Craig LeBlanc, says, ”Whenever we have minor or major product improvements, I’m planning to use Navattic to create a new tour and share it with our employees.”

Ryan Moline, another Navattic customer, does the same thing:

“I tend to copy demos and tailor them to internal training, explaining to AEs how the partner’s platform works with ours.

I make it super enablement-driven so that our team knows the nuances and has the context to talk intelligently about how our data lives in partners’ platforms when they’re on the phone with prospects.”

But interactive demos don’t have to be limited to internal learning. You can also use them in new feature launches to accelerate partner and customer enablement.

Want to see some examples of external feature launches? We’ve got 6 of them to share.

If you need some help putting these tips into practice or want a second pair of eyes, reach out to one of our Navattic demo building partners.

Every demo consultant is a previous Navattic customer and a pro at creating high-converting demos.

Check out their bios to learn more and get in touch.