Interactive Product Demos: Benefits and Best Practices

Video is a great way to deliver instructions. It’s accessible. It’s easily consumed. It’s user-friendly. That’s why you find endless DIY walkthroughs on YouTube. From home remodeling to car repair – someone has taken the time to record their process, and thousands of people learn from it.

Sometimes, though, a video demonstration isn’t enough to get the entire point across. Sometimes, you have to get your hands dirty (possibly literally if you’re trying to change a tire).

Watching an automated demo is great for educating your buyers on the values of the features they care most about. Still, nothing builds confidence with users like being able to play around on the platform.

But building and maintaining sandbox environments where customers can test drive a platform and  “kick the tires” is not feasible. It’s expensive. In fact, it’s a drain on time, resources, and patience.

Fortunately, product tour software has evolved, so you no longer have to choose between a demonstration video and an interactive video demo. This allows users to experience how your product works on their terms, on their own time, and without having to “click every click.”

Benefits of Using Interactive Product Demos

Interactive product demos allow customers to view and interact with your software without full access.

The benefits are:

• Connect the “what” of your product with the “why” you explain in your videos
• Reiterate key value propositions with different forms of media
• Allow stakeholders to explore your UI
• Drive engagement with demos to increase the viral effect

Adding interactive elements and captured live product UI lets customers explore the product and learn how your product solves their pain points.

Interactive Product Demo Best Practices

Create buzz around your product in every interaction, no matter if it’s presales, sales, marketing, and customer success. Let your product do the talking for you with a demo experience that engages prospects and customers alike.

To create the most effective product tour, follow these tips:

• Craft thoughtful, multipage stories that communicate value to your buyers
• Edit images as you capture to give buyers the ideal product experience
• Personalize each interactive product demo to provide value for different viewers’ needs
• Use a combination of text and video to explain key elements of your solution
• Use lists to call out main value points. Don’t make your viewers dig through paragraphs
• Go further than a simple description; give customers a detailed explanation of value
• Tell a story that encourages the viewer to interact with the demo
• Only add 2-5 hotspots per page to avoid information overload
• Name your pages appropriately so that when you go to the heatmap, you know which pages are most/least viewed
• Use high-quality images for screenshots or DOM of captured pages

Consensus Tours – How it Works

Consensus Tours give buyers a new way to explore products independently and asynchronously. Presales and sales teams can create a prescriptive story path that takes a buyer on a multipage immersive experience incorporating live product UI and task-based navigation.

Pages will continue to use text and video explainers, called “HotSpots,” to explain further what a product does in relation to the value proposition the buyer experiences in the existing interactive video demo experience.

And the best part is you’ll be telling product-led stories in minutes without any help from professional services. Presales and sales reps alike have complete control over the tour creation process. They can easily create (or update) and share Tours in minutes, giving them valuable time back in their day while continuing to enable their buyers to make connections with their products and how they individually benefit from the solution.

For more on interactive product demos and all things demo automation, check out our blog, research, or even your own custom demo.