How to Build a Winning Marketing Strategy with Interactive Demos

Any marketing strategy has one goal in mind – to boost the number of high-quality leads sent over to sales. Customers need to be able to see value in a product or service before they commit to a sales conversation or starting a trial. Traditionally, marketers have access to a few forms to showcase their product to prospective buyers: video or screenshots. These static methods are great for some mediums, however, lack the hands-on engagement today’s buyers seek. Can you remember the last time you really enjoyed sitting back and watching a 10 minute product video?

A new medium has crept up to meet modern buyers' needs - interactive demos. Marketing teams are realizing it’s one of the most powerful ways a business can build a differentiated marketing strategy. Interactive demos can also serve as an effective method for sharing the hands-on experience that is traditionally heavily gated in the evaluation process.

Interactive demos are an efficient, cost-effective way of grabbing potential customers’ attention and interest while giving them a hands-on experience in the product.

What is better - listening to a 7 minute talk about improving their business processes or allowing a user to have a first-hand experience in the product to understand how they can use the platform to improve their processes?

The customer also has the agency to decide if they then wish to connect with the team or start a trial right after the interactive product demo.

Beyond this, interactive demos:

• are engaging
• allow companies to become product-led
• provide a compelling way to share a product story
• enable sales and generate leads
• provide invaluable analytics and customer insights

There are two main ways to integrate an interactive website product demo. It could be on the company’s website’s landing page or via a ‘product tour’ button.

The first way means that almost all customers and potential customers scrolling through the web page will experience a website product tour and engage with the interactive product demo.

Clicking into a product tour is often beneficial so that you can gate it via a lead capture form. This will help you see which interested prospects engage with the demo.

The most important characteristics of a marketing strategy with website demo software are:

• telling a story (the brand’s story, the product’s story, the story of how the product will impact the customer’s life)
• getting to the ‘’aha’’ moment – the moment where the customer goes ‘’aha’’! This could really be beneficial for me, or perhaps ‘’aha’’, that’s a great solution to a problem that I have
• encouraging prospects to learn more about the product and chat with sales via a call to action

We typically see two common approaches for lead generation. One is to provide a gate prior to access to a demo.

Unlike other mediums, guided interactive demos uniquely provide a way to offer continuous call to actions throughout the user experience. Unlike a static video or whitepaper, you can build call-to-actions that meet users at the peak of their engagement and intent. I.e. when you show a workflow that commonly meets a users’ use case or challenge, in addition to a next button, add an option for a users to begin a trial or schedule time to learn more. They saw how your solution provides value, now minimize friction and encourage them to take the next step to get engaged right in the product tour itself.

How can you track the success of an interactive demo initiative? Tracking the success is first based upon the end goal of building the tour in the first place. Once you have that in place, you can then think through what metrics correspond to that aim. For example:

Do you want to educate users? If so, session time and % completion might be relevant metrics for you.

Is your aim to capture a list of leads to pass along to sales? If so, the number of leads captured via form might be the right metric for you.

Is your aim to drive trial or demo conversion? If so, the number of conversion events for the “Schedule Demo” or “Start Trial” buttons in the tour could be the right metrics to track.

Questions on building out interactive website demos? Get in touch with the Navattic team and we’d be happy to help.