How This Playbook Will Help You
The purpose of this playbook is to help PMMs to design, build, and launch their first interactive demo as quickly as possible.
You’ll…
- Understand what interactive demos are and why they're crucial for product marketing
- Identify the right type of interactive demo for your product and use case
- Have step-by-step instructions on how to build, distribute, and measure an effective interactive demo
- Know best practices for launching and promoting your interactive demo
- Measure the success of your interactive demo and iterating for improvement
By the end of this playbook, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to create interactive demos that…
- Drive engagement and conversions
- Showcase your product's value proposition
- Accelerate sales cycles
Whether your boss just dropped the idea of demos on to your lap or you’re mapping out a new strategy that includes it, this guide will serve as your go-to resource for designing and improving your demos.
Let’s dive in.
How to Build & Launch an Interactive Demo
So you’ve been tasked with creating an interactive demo for your product. What’s an interactive demo? How can you use it? How do you build one?
We’ll answers these questions and more in the following sections:
Jump to a specific section using the Table of Contents on the right 👉
But first, why should you consider building an interactive demo in the first place?
The Case for Interactive Demos (3 Reasons)
The way people buy is changing.
Buyers want immediate, ungated access to test your product. According to the Gorilla Group’s B2B Future Shopper Report, 90% of B2B buyers expect a B2C experience. They want to be able to explore your product on their own.
We’re at a point where sales reps only have about 5% of a customer’s time during the sales cycle. We need to let people do research on their own.
The idea of doing a vendor evaluation overwhelms many people to the point where it’s easier to just do nothing. We know that between 40-60% of B2B purchasing processes today end in a “no decision” for a lot of buyers.
We need to make the buying process easier by letting people do research on their own. But the solutions we’re using today just don’t cut it.
Live demos are hard to book
56% of vendors take 2+ days to respond to a demo request. 35% of them don’t even respond. Of the 71% that do respond, need to send 2 or more follow up emails to the prospect to book a demo.
Product-led growth (PLG) has friction
People want to see the value of your product before having to talk to sales. This is why over 60% of of the 100 top-performing SaaS companies are now PLG. But even with a free trial, a user would have to sign up, put in their credit card information, and set up the product. There’s still friction between the user and their interaction with the product.
Video isn’t cutting it
Most demos today are done with video. The problem is video has low watch rates. Videos can also be costly and time-intensive to make. Coupled with the fact that Wynter’s Peep Laja found that on average, only 10-15% of visitors watch a product video, they ROI for creating them is miniscule. In addition, demo videos are not interactive and can quickly become outdated if your UI changes. Finally, demo videos also tend to be one-size fits all, so your ability to sell to different segments and persona are limited to that one video.
Buyers are expecting something new. We’re making it way harder than it needs to be for them to see our product.
So the solution? Make it easier for them to see and test out our product. And that’s where interactive demos come in.
If you need a way to get buy-in from your team and your boss to build and use interactive demos, here’s a simple cheatsheet you can use to present and summarize the reasons we just covered.
Part 1: Interactive Demos 101
An interactive demo is a self-guided walkthrough that lets a prospect try your product before buying, scheduling a demo, or signing up.
This is a classic case of try before you buy. You’re letting people see the value before they have to put in the effort to sign up, book a sales call, or set up the product.
Take Seismic, for example. Their main CTA on their website is to get a demo. If you want to see their product and what it can do for you, you’ll have to work with their sales team.
Contrast that to Seismic’s competitor, Guru.
Guru’s main CTA on their homepage is to take a product tour. They want people to see the product and get behind the wheel, knowing that that will drive more signups and demos of their product.
Why do these work? Two reasons…
- Higher engagement rates. Navattic found that the best interactive demos have an average of 30-40%.
- Higher buyer conversion. We see the engagement rates on Inter. Demos are higher so on average, ungated embedded demos had an engagement rate of 24%
Trainual did an A/B Test of their CTA on their site, leading users to a live demo video, a recorded demo video, versus an interactive tour.
After a few weeks they saw…
- A 450% lift in free trial signups
- A 100% lift in users reaching activated trial status
- A 175% lift in users converting to paid in that same timeframe
In other words, they found that interactive demos get more people to actively use the product and convert into paid trials.
Hopefully by now you’re convinced of the value of interactive demos… So it’s time to go into the types of demos.
There are 3 Types of Interactive Demos…
Type 1: Guided Video/Screenshot.
These are demos that use videos and screenshots, usually overlayed with call outs and tool tips on top of your product. The goal is to lead a user step-by-step towards a specific a-ha moment for your product.
Type 2: Guided HTML/CSS
Instead of capturing a screenshot, you’re capturing the underlying code of a page. This creates a lifelike replica of your product that lets a user click buttons and input text, with interactive elements built on top to build out a guided tour.
Type 3: Sandbox Replicas.
These is a demo instance of your product that lacks the self-guided tour element. Th user can click around and explore on their own, especially if they know what they’re doing. This is a perfect use case for sales teams who want to have a demo instance they can use on sales calls.
Which interactive demo solution should you use?
Now that you understand all the different ways you can build interactive demos, you’re probably starting to think about how you’re going to do it.
And there’s tons out there.
In general, here are 4 questions you should yourself before you choose a solution:
- Question 1: What are your use cases and objectives? Think about your goal for building the demo and who will be using it. More on this later.
- Question 2: Do you need a self-serve or a live demo? A self-serve demo will allow a user or prospect to click through and understand your product, without needing you in the room. A live demo will allow you or someone on your team to guide a user through the product.
- Question 3: How much do you care about in-product feel? A screenshot demo will be faster and simpler to build, but an HTML/CSS capture demo will allow users to interact with the actual product.
- Question 4: How long do you have to implement it? If you need something fast, go with a simpler demo. But if you have more time to recreate an instance, then you can play around with a sandbox demo.
If you’re planning to evaluate interactive demo products, I created a simple scorecard you can use. This is going to allow you to score and evaluate the 10 considerations you need to consider when comparing vendors, in terms of how important they are for you and how each vendor stacks up.
Now that you have an idea of what kind of demo you want and have begun looking at software vendors for building it, it’s time to feed your creativity. Here’s…
14 Ways You Can Use Interactive Demos to Accelerate Your Customer Journey
In this section of the playbook, I’ll show you fourteen ways you can use interactive demos.
We’ll be covering over a dozen use cases that cover the full marketing and sales funnel. I’ll give tips and examples for homepages, demo centers, and live sales demos — even post-sales and upsells.
Along the way, I encourage you to think about your use cases.
Getting started with interactive demos can be daunting. So you need to focus and build for your primary use case first before expanding later on.
Let’s get into it.
Use Case 1: Homepage
This is one of the simplest, most common primary use cases for an interactive. I recommend embedding a demo above the fold to create instant engagement on your homepage. I’ve also seen a “Get a Demo” as the primary CTA with “Tour the Product” as a secondary CTA.
Use Case 2: Product Pages
The most common way I’ve seen this in action is in a company’s Product Overview page. You can also do this for specific product or feature pages. You could also embed this in persona or solutions pages, allowing you to give more contextual and comprehensive interactive tours of the product.
Use Case 3: SEO
If you have a page that shows up under a main search result like your brand name or a SERP, one cool thing you can do is embed the demo on that page. This is a great way to start bringing your demo into other channels.
Use Case 4: Paid Ads
You can send paid traffic to a landing page with your interactive tour. Pro tip: If lead generation is your top priority and you’re OK with a drop in engagement, then you should gate your tour. You can also A/B test this by sending some traffic to a “Book a Demo” landing page versus an interactive tour with a conversion to a live demo.
Use Case 5: Blog
Regardless of where they are in the funnel, blog posts can have interactive demos woven into them so people can begin testing out the product live on the site. This also drives further engagement and time-on-page for your blog posts, which boosts SEO.
Use Case 6: Demo Center
A Demo Center is a collection of bite-sized, self-serve demos in a single page. This allows prospects to pick and choose the demos they engage with, based on specific pain points they have. This way, you can track which demos active leads are interacting with and help reps have more contextual conversations with them during their sales cycle.
Use Case 7: Nurture
Experiment with pointing the CTAs for your email drip nurture campaigns to an interactive demo. This is a bottom-of-funnel tactic that lets the customer engage with the product as you talk about it.
Use Case 8: Product Launches
I think product launch posts should \always\ have an interactive demo. For launches, I’ve used them as the main CTA in our emails, our social posts, and in blog posts as a way to drive people to actually experience the product. The sales team loved this and shared the posts because they contained information about the launch and the self-guided tour.
Use Case 9: ABM
If you pair an interactive demo like Navattic with marketing automation platforms or sales tools like Clearbit, you can capture data on your visitors, populate your demo with their data, and tailor it to them. You can also build interactive demos that are focused on personas, key industries, or verticals to create custom, contextual demos.
Use Case 10: Sales Demo
Live sales demos usually means a sandbox-type interactive demo. These demos are not guided, allowing the sales rep or the prospect to explore the product and do whatever they want with a great replica of the product.
Use Case 11: Lead Follow-Up
Once a prospect is in a sales cycle, you can use an interactive demo as a great lead follow-up after a discovery call or demo. The demo can focus on a specific challenge or a key part of the platform. A specific CTA within an email, for example, moves them closer to activation, an upgrade, or an upsell.
Use Case 12: Upsell
You can embed the demo within your live application, encouraging free trial users to take a self-guided tour and drive upsells.
Use Case 13: Onboarding.
Interactive demos are not only great for prospect education, but also for customer education. They make it easy for new customers to get in, check out the product, understand how to use it, and ultimately, activate faster.
Use Case 14: Documentation.
Finally, you can also embed demos into your support documentation to help these articles be more interactive and help with feature and product adoption.
Part 2: 8 Steps to Build & Launch Your First Interactive Demo (In 3 Days or Less)
Step 1: Know your objective
Do this step in: 1 hour
Why are you building the demo?
Before you start building, you need to know why you’re building this. Is it to drive demos? Do you want more free trials? Or maybe you want more adoption or activation within your product.
Keeping your goals in mind dictates how you’re going to build the demo, what you’ll be building, and the channels you’ll be building for.
Here are 6 more examples of goals people usually have for their demos (pick 1!):
- Goal 1: Demos. The demo will help increase the amount of live demos booked with your sales team.
- Goal 2: Trials. The demo will help drive more free trial activations for your product.
- Goal 3: Signups. The demo will help drive more email registrations for your product or service.
- Goal 4: Adoption. The demo will help users get up and running with your product faster.
- Goal 5: Expansion. The demo will help drive more activation within your product.
- Goal 6: Pipeline velocity. The demo will target a bottleneck in the sales cycle and help speed up the sales process for a prospect.
OK, let’s take my demo for my product, PMM Productivity Hub, as a case study.
When I sat down to create the interactive demo for it, my primary goal was to drive sales. The hub is a low-cost product so I wanted something that would allow people to see the template before they bought it. I also wanted to give them a low-commitment way to see the template (and learn more with a 7-minute video later on).
So far, the demo has been seen by 1,500 people and has driven $20,000 in revenue with a 10% conversion from visitor to sale, with zero extra work from me.
When you factor in the fact that sales conversions usually hover at 1%, that’s a stellar conversion — for a demo I spent less than 8 hours building!
Step 2: Choose your audience
Do this step in: 1 hour
Who are you building this for?
The short answer: target the end user. You’re not building this for the executive decision-maker or for an admin. Build the demo for the day-to-day user.
A good rule of thumb: approach the demo with a product-led growth mindset.
Here’s 3 things to keep in mind as you think about the audience for your demo:
- End user vs Admin. Help the user imagine how the product will improve their day-to-day. Now how to manage it (admin). And not for the CFO (executive decision-maker).
- Company Profile. Someone from a 10-person startup will have different priorities than someone from a 200-person Series B company.
- Persona. It’s hard to build a demo for multiple personas. So keep one specific ICP in mind and speak to them in your demo. No vague positioning.
For my PMM Productivity Hub, I build the demo for first PMMs at startups.
This helped me hone in on the key feature to highlight: the hub’s impact dashboard. This allowed PMMs and their manager (usually the founder or CEO) to gain visibility into how their work impacted the business. This was a unique feature that many startups PMMs needed but didn’t know how to start building.
Many PMMs at larger companies also found value in the dashboard later on.
But it was the singular focus on startup PMMs that made the demo so effective.
Step 3: Choose your distribution channels
Do this step in: 1 hour
How will your demo be used?
You can embed interactive demos in channels that reach all different stages of the buying journey. But If you’re just starting out, start with your primary use case. This tends to be the homepage, followed by product pages.
Start with the most important one, then move down.
Knowing your distribution channels and use cases for the demo is key because this affects what you include or don’t include in the demo.
Here’s a few examples.
- Homepage. If it’s the homepage, then you could consider building a more general demo than one that will live on a product page.
- Follow Up Emails. This is for sales reps who might want an easy way to use demos after a call or to enable their champion to talk about the product internally.
- Paid Ads. Companies can drive traffic from paid ads to an interactive demo page. If the goal is to drive leads from paid ads, then you might even consider gating the demo.
- Product Page. The demo has to be more specific than one that will live on a homepage.
- Blog Posts. Embedding demos in launch or case study blog posts, as well as review sites like G2 and Trustpilot work really well. I’ve also seen companies like Dooly, embed hyper-specific demos in pages that rank for SEO.
- Demo Centers. This collects a selection of interactive demos in one page. This allows prospects to self-serve (and self-select!) their experience. This is getting pretty popular.
With Productive PMM, the demo mainly lived on my website. I also shared the demo link in emails. Because of this, my demo gives a general overview of the tool, while encouraging users to imagine how their lives will change if they buy it.
Step 4: Create and validate your storyboard
Do this step in: 1 hour
At this point, you’re itching to hop into your interactive demo tool. Stop. You don’t want to just hop into a tool like Navattic without storyboarding your demo. Building tool tips, capturing screens… It can get confusing and overwhelming very quickly.
Instead, you want to map out what your story will be first. Think through all the steps of your tour.
Write out the copy. Think of what the screen will look like, whether that’s a call out or a tool tip. Think about where you’re going to place it on the screen. Plan out the button copy and timing for your CTAs.
Taking a few minutes now to map all this out beforehand will save you hours of time later.
How do you do start storyboarding? Here are 8 questions you can use as a starting point to help with the storyboarding process.
- What is the buyer’s problem or JTBD?
- What do you want them to think and feel?
- What “aha” moment will get people to convert?
- What anxieties or challenges keep them from acting?
- What are your differentiating capabilities?
- What are your must-see capabilities?
- What do they NOT need to see?
- What is the goal of this demo?
For the PMM Productivity Hub, the JTBD was that most PMMs want to stay productive and show the impact they’re making.
So with my demo, I wanted them to imagine what it would be like to have clarity and visibility over their work. I wanted them to feel a sense of FOMO each moment they struggled to communicate the results they achieved or felt overwhelmed at work. Ultimately, I wanted them to feel excited about the product without getting into the weeds of set up and onboarding.
This is why my demo highlighted the impact dashboard — and why I left out most of the projects and task databases.
Looking back though, there were a few storyboarding upgrades that would’ve made the demo even better.
- Specific Aha Moment. The whole product feels like an aha moment. But I would have liked to hone in on the impact dashboard and what it would feel like to walk into a 1:1 with a manager and being to pull that out.
- Overwhelm. The hub looks like a lot to setup and a lot of moving parts. The demo could be better if I mentioned that it only takes 10 minutes to set up or that the template views update themselves automatically.
- Address “I Don’t Use Notion” Objection. In the demo, I assumed that the user was familiar with Notion. I could have mentioned the support I provide via email.
If you’re overwhelmed or struggling to get started on your storyboard, here’s a template I made that you can use as a starting point:
Step 5: Capture your screens
Do this step in: 1 hour
Once you have your storyboard mapped out, it’s time for the fun part – capturing your screens!
Screen capture tools can be basic. You just upload your own screenshots to them. Others let you upload GIFs or product videos. Others, like Navattic (my tool of choice), have Chrome extensions that capture and recreate the underlying HTML code on the page.
By this time, you know exactly what you want to capture and the kind of demo you want to build. So it should be pretty simple to settle on a tool.
Finally, here are 3 pro tips to help you with this step.
- Tip 1: Capture with the same screen resolution. Use a Chrome extension called Window Resizer to change the screen size. Always grab screeneshots on the laptop resolution. This way, the demo looks good, even on a small screen.
- Tip 2: Make sure the data looks good. Especially if you’re using a lightweight, basic version, or free tool like Storylane, make sure you’re using a good demo instance so you’re not capturing bad data or analytics. You can also use the “Inspect Element” function to edit the code on the page. (This is why I prefer Navattic’s HTML capture – I can go back and edit all the text in the app after the fact.)
- Tip 3: Capture more than you need. When you sit down to capture your screens, grab more than you think you’ll need. You can decide what you want to use later without having to come back and recapture again.
Step 6: Build your demo
Do this step in: 3 hours
Once you have your storyboard and screenshots, it’s time to build your demo!
If you’re using a tool that captures the underlying CSS and HTML, you can edit, blur, or anonymize the data on those screens. You can delete sections that might not be core to the demo experience to make things look cleaner. Then start overlaying tool tips, call outs, and CTAs.
Everything you need to do be able to share or embed the link to the demo at the end of the day.
Here are the 5 steps I usually go through on this phase:
- Hop into Navattic
- Set up all the steps
- Add in all the copy
- Upload screen captures
- Attach modals, tool tips, and CTAs to the screens
If you’ve followed all the steps so far, you can do most of these creation steps — capture your screens, build out the demo, and edit all — on the same day.
Step 7: Rollout
Do this step in: 1 day
The rollout for a demo typically means two steps: embedding and sharing.
Once you’ve built your demo, most of these demo platforms allow you share or embed a link to it. Work with your web developer to embed it to your web pages or blog posts. Then test the responsiveness and speed of web pages with this new widget on them.
Be mindful of what that experience is going to be like. Then share it with your sales team.
Interactive demos are great resources for sales and customer success teams. They love the ability to share a self-guided tour with customers. So tell your team about the demo. Teach them how to use it.
This way they know how to position the demo when they start sharing it.
But just because they know the demo exists, doesn’t mean they know when to pull it up.
Here is a brief checklist I go through whenever I’m introducing a new interactive demo to my team’s workflow:
Action Step 1: Record a Walkthrough for Sales Enablement
I’ll send a Loom video to my team, clicking through the demo and talking about why we built it the way we did. I also talk about why they might want it to share with someone, something like, “Guys, anytime you hop off a call, send them this interactive demo. People who watch this convert 10 times higher.” Encourage your team to get everyone in the prospect’s company to take the demo themselves.
Action Step 2: Create Email Templates
I would also give my team a template to use when sharing the demo.
Hey {Prospect},
Thanks for the call today.
Just as a quick follow up, I wanted to share this interactive demo that walks you through step by step a lot of the things that we covered in today's call.
{Insert Link}
I find this a great tool that you can use to share our product across your team and allow others to get the same demo.
Action Step 3: Set Up a Demo Center
This doesn’t have to be complicated. It could just be a page or a wiki where your sales and customer support teams can access all the demos you have.
Step 8: Measure and optimize
This step is Ongoing
Once your demo is out in the world, how do you know if it’s doing well?
You don’t want to just put the demo out there and hope for the best. Most platforms have a way to look at analytics. You want to look at your demo completion and drop-off. But you can also see how far the average person makes it into the demo.
Continuously iterating helps you learn more about your prospect and upgrade your demo accordingly.
If you’re wondering where to start, here are 6 metrics you can look at to find ways to optimize your demo:
- Metric 1: Demo Completion. This helps you determine if your demo is too long.
- Metric 2: Drop-Off Rates. This is one of the key metrics to track. I like to add CTAs at key drop-off points to keep prospects engaged, add a little entertainment, or shorten the demo altogether.
- Metric 3: CTA Interactions. You can also consider optimizing the clickthrough rates on your CTAs.
- Metric 4: A/B Tests. Test out different button copy, landing pages, etc. to optimize engagement and conversions.
- Metric 5: Conversions. Especially if your goal is to drive signups or book demos, you want to look at how people interacting with your demo and if they’re converting down the funnel.
- Metric 6: Down-Funnel Effect. How is the demo impacting win rates? Is it moving prospects through the sales cycle faster? If your tool integrates with your CRM, you can look at the buyers that interacted with your tour, cohort them out, and look for a difference in the down-funnel metrics.
Part 3: 10 Best Practices for High-Converting Demos
1. Make it easy to find
Don’t hide it in a dropdown or in the footer. Give it attention on the top right corner of your navigation. Put “See a Demo” right next to “Book a Demo”. Or even as the primary CTA on your hero.
2. Sell the demo, start with a hook
Saying “Take Our Interactive Tour” isn’t enough to get people to click on it. Treat your demo’s welcome screen like landing page: sell it with social proof or with reasons why they should be interested.
3. Make it a demo, not a how-to
Your demo is a use case, not documentation. Tell a story. Treat it like a real life sales demo, not a feature overview.
4. Don’t forget the pain points
Talk about the pain your product is solving. Again, don’t just show how your product works. Sell them on the value of getting rid of the problem you solve.
5. Talk like a human
Emma Stratton said it best: Talk like you would at a barbecue. Speak like you would to a real person.
6. Use social proof
Encourage greater conversions by featuring the brands, customers, or companies your prospect will be joining by becoming a customer. Do it as early as possible in, then keep doing it all throughout the demo. This drives home the key value propositions you’re trying to tell people.
7. Don’t make it too long
Aim for a maximum of 15 steps. Look at the dropoff points, as well, to find your sweet spot. And if you can get people to that aha moment in less than 15… Well, why not?
8. Run experiments
Take advantage of the opportunity to optimize your tour experience. A/B test CTAs on your homepage. Split test “Click to Demo” vs “Watch a Demo”. Don’t just put your demo up then leave it. Iterate and improve it.
9. Use CTAs every ~5 steps
Don’t just put a CTA at the end. Having CTAs at multiple points in your demo helps you identify drop-off areas and optimize from there. Once you find out where most people leave, you can put a CTA or some social proof to catch them before they leave.
10. Gate wisely
In general, keep your demo ungated to make it easy as possible for buyers to see and interactive with your product. If you’re going to gate it, don’t ask for multiple fields. Just ask for a single piece of information like their email. Or keep the basic demo open, then gate a more advanced version later on.
Want to keep these tips on your desk as you build your demo? Here’s a handy PDF you can download and print out:
FAQs
Resources
- How This Playbook Will Help You
- How to Build & Launch an Interactive Demo
- The Case for Interactive Demos (3 Reasons)
- Part 1: Interactive Demos 101
- There are 3 Types of Interactive Demos…
- Which interactive demo solution should you use?
- 14 Ways You Can Use Interactive Demos to Accelerate Your Customer Journey
- Part 2: 8 Steps to Build & Launch Your First Interactive Demo (In 3 Days or Less)
- Step 1: Know your objective
- Step 2: Choose your audience
- Step 3: Choose your distribution channels
- Step 4: Create and validate your storyboard
- Step 5: Capture your screens
- Step 6: Build your demo
- Step 7: Rollout
- Step 8: Measure and optimize
- Part 3: 10 Best Practices for High-Converting Demos
- FAQs
- Resources