6 ways to include interactive product demos throughout the buyer’s journey

Product demos aren’t just for the live sales demo call anymore. In fact, you can use them across the entire buyer’s journey to give your prospects the in-depth, interactive product experiences they crave. 

Here are six creative ways to use interactive product demos to accelerate time-to-value throughout the buyer's journey.

1. In a thought leadership piece

Thought leadership content, or any kind of blog post, are great ways to attract prospects and grow your brand awareness. And while you have the eyeballs of those readers on your content, you can add in a mini interactive product demo to illustrate a point.

I like to call this "bite-sized PLG."

Just like adding a graphic can draw a reader’s eye, a mini demo can let potential buyers see and experience what you’re talking about. For example, let’s say your SaaS product is customer service software. You can talk about a specific feature you offer that solves a common pain point, and add a micro-demo that shows prospects what that looks like in action. 

💡 If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how many more do you think an interactive demo is worth?

2. On your homepage

This is a classic use of interactive product demos—right on your homepage. Once a prospect navigates there to learn more about your company and what you do, you can offer them a clickable, interactive tour of your product right up front. Check out Conquer’s homepage demo for a great example.

Forrester research shows that 60% of buyers will go to a vendor’s website before accepting an online or in-person sales meeting, so showing your product upfront helps prospects qualify themselves. If they like the glimpse they get here and contact your sales team, your deal is one step closer to closing.

3. On your product pages

Once a website visitor has gotten the general look and feel for your product as a whole, you can dive into showing them any specific features and use cases that might interest them on your product pages. Check out how EvaluAgent created a library of product feature demos to see it in action. 

The key here is to ensure your product pages are easily navigable by all of your ideal buyers so they can explore and research easily on their own if they prefer. And that ease and helpfulness pay off in buyer experience and deal size. 

Gartner research has found that customers who found the information they received from suppliers to be helpful were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret. 

4. As a free trial or freemium onboarding asset

So your prospect is now intrigued enough by your interactive tours to sign up for your free trial or freemium option—awesome! Bet you didn’t know that interactive demos are critical here as well. 

In fact, providing a variety of resources for your onboarding process, such as help articles, templates, video tutorials, or interactive demos can accelerate value by giving users the option to choose how they learn.

Including bite-sized interactive self-guided demos in your onboarding process is a great way to guide new users to seeing immediate product value because they'll know what they’re doing (this is even more critical if your product is quite complex). Seeing more value upfront means they’re less likely to drop off and more likely to convert to paid customers eventually. 

5. As a demo leave-behind 

After a sales call, are you still sending a one-pager to your prospect? There’s a really good chance they’re not ever reading that. Instead, send them a quick, tailored, interactive demo leave-behind based on what you discussed during the call. If they asked about a specific feature, send them a short self-guided demo showing that feature. 

If they have a similar problem to another customer, send them a demo showing how that customer solved it with your software. With the Reprise demo creation platform, you can easily edit, customize, and anonymize your data. This way, you can edit data (and dates) as you create a self-guided demo, so private information stays private.

6. As a champion enablement asset 

63% of purchases today have more than four people involved — vs. just 47% in 2017. And most of those people involved aren’t eager to hop on a sales call with someone they don’t know for a product they haven’t even seen. 

Enabling your champions with a takeaway demo designed to appeal to their stakeholders helps you overcome this hurdle. Once you have a champion who is excited about your product, perhaps because they’ve had a live sales demo or signed up for a free trial, you just need to give them the tools to sell to their own organization.

Giving them an interactive guided demo tailored to their needs means they can show their internal decision-makers exactly how your product will solve a significant pain point, you’re that much closer to a deal. 

From the beginning to the end of the buyer’s journey 

Demos can be used in so many ways throughout the buyer’s journey—but don’t get overwhelmed at the thought of creating so many different kinds of interactive demos. With a comprehensive demo creation platform like Reprise, you can build all the kinds of guided demos we mentioned above, as well as live sales demos. Learn more today!