How to Create An Awesome Interactive Product Demo

In this new product-led era, buyers are deciding quickly and want to feel the product to make those decisions. However as a growth marketer, one of the challenges is to get your prospects to engage with the product quickly enough. Each day you lose prospects because they didn’t get to see your product.

An interactive product demo or tour is a great way to build trust with your prospects. In this article, I will go over the series of steps you want to take to build an interactive product demo.

Let's get started.

How to create Interactive Product Demo?

Here are the 8 steps you need to take:

1. Questions to ask‍

There are some fundamental questions to ask before creating your interactive product demo or tour. This can be very product and company specific.

(a) Guided product tour or Custom demo
A custom demo is useful when you can trust the buyer to know what they are doing. Often, when buyers land on a new product, they don’t know what to do and finally get frustrated. Since Storylane allows you to build both a custom demo or a guided walk through experience, we have the data which indicates that a guided product tour works best. It enables you to let your prospects go through a guard-railed experience of your product.
A custom demo is more useful at the later stages of the buyer's journey where they will invest even more time to explore the product. At that time, you can have them engage with a custom demo as an alternative to a pre-POC demo.

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‍(b) Video or interactive demo
A well produced video of your product is a great way to showcase your product. But a good video will need to stitch together the product imagery and is hard to build. Moreover, it's not self guided and doesn’t gives that aha moment to the prospect which comes only out of self exploration. This is where a more interactive experience of the product demo helps.

2. Choose the right tool

There are many solutions in the market and certainly Storylane is one of them. Storylane excels in a few aspects. It can help you build both a custom demo for sales or an interactive product tour for marketing and capturing leads. However it’s not a demo video tool

3. Create a story that you want to tell

Story is what will draw your prospects to engage deeply and eventually make a buying decision. Your prospects want to evaluate quickly how your product is going to make their life simpler and be valuable over time. A good story is when you can articulate the “aha” moments when your customers use your product.

4. Capture your screens

Capture your product through the native screen capture tools available in your browser or your computer. Storylane offers you a Chrome extension through which you can capture your product. You have the option of capturing the entire HTML or only images of the product. Image captures result in a faster time to value since it’s extremely easy to build.

5. Add guided widgets

Guided widgets (or explainer bubbles) enable you to tell your story through a guided walkthrough for your prospects. It’s a very powerful tool to communicate the value of your product as they step through the screens. Intercom, Walkme and Pendo use it beautifully as an onboarding journey for users. You can use it for the product demos that you have built and improve the user experience with these explainer bubbles through guided widgets.

6. Gather information about your Leads

(a) Lead Form‍

A well scripted interactive product tour when embedded on the website will generate more qualified leads. Your prospects on the website will want to experience it. So have your lead capture form at the start, end or middle of the product tour. You want to get the information from them at their highest point of excitement.  Ask for quick info like - Name and Email

(b) Intelligent Lead Insights 
Use services like Clearbit and Zoominfo to get lot of insight about your leads. Storylane integrates with these services to provide the info and you might not even need to collect through lead form 

(c) Integrate chat

‍Another option in addition to the above ones, would be to add chat widget to interactive product tour like intercom or drift. Through Storylane you can simply add these widgets and have them connect with sales rep at appropriate time during their journey in product tour

7. Create a unique sharable link

Another use case of your demos is to send it to buyers who are looking at your product and evaluating it. A way to stand out from competitors is to have them experience your product quickly enough. That way the champion in the buyers organization can create enough pull towards your product and you can close the sale quickly.

After you have the interactive demo, share it not just as an embedded product demo on the website, but personalize it and send it to the buyers. The demo software you chose should be such that it’s easy to customize your demo and share it.
To share, you do want to get the unique analytics like what Docsend is able to do for document and collateral sharing. But more importantly when you create a shareable link, it should be possible to automatically personalize the demo to the name of the company and their vertical.

8. Get analytics that works

Analytics is the cornerstone for evaluating the success of these interactive product demos and pushing your leads deeper into the funnel. You want to track a few metrics -
- Who has viewed your demo
- How many steps have they progressed in your entire self-guided product tour
- How much time have they spent on the product tour
- How many members of the same company have viewed it
And this analytics has to be available in your system of records like Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce.

Now that you know how to make a killer interactive product demo, it's time to start using some awesome tools available in the market and winning the love of your buyers and driving your Product-led growth.