Top Use Cases for Interactive Demos
Head of Growth & Product Marketing
Did you know the average Navattic customer uses interactive demos for five different use cases?
As you might guess, websites are the most common use case — nearly 64% of survey respondents had their demo embedded on home or product pages.
Yet our State of the Interactive Product Demo research shows an increase in the use of interactive demos across the entire GTM funnel, from user training to live demo enablement to sales outreach.
Below, we’ll cover the top 3 use cases to use at each stage of your customer journey — and a bonus one not mentioned in the report.
Top of funnel
At the top of the funnel, demos help generate awareness and educate potential customers.
Traditionally, brands rely on blog content, ebooks, and webinars to do the heavy lifting. Interactive demos perfectly complement these assets, allowing readers to try out your product as they learn about it.
Use case 1: Website call-to-actions
Adding interactive demos to your website offers two main benefits:
- They give your prospects a chance to do their own research without talking to sales.
- They increase your website’s efficiency.
Per product marketer Aston Whiteling: “I'm a firm believer in having all different kinds of content on your website so people can learn about your product in different ways. I made Navattic product tours the website’s ‘crown jewels’ because they are highly engaging and super versatile.”
Greater engagement turns into a higher likelihood of conversion. After inserting interactive demos on 12 pages of the Jellyfish website, Aston saw:
- A 250% increase in visitors interacting with the website (going through Navattic tours)
- A 300% increase in CTA clicks
- A 25% CTR for those CTAs
Want some helpful tips for adding interactive demos to your website?
Read more here: Incorporating Interactive Demos into a Website Redesign
Use case 2: Paid campaigns & social media
Instead of directing traffic to static landing pages, use interactive demos.
Encouraging users to explore your product is much less of a lift than asking them to book a demo or sign up for (and actually use) a free trial. Plus, prospects immediately see product value — which is why interactive demos tend to improve paid ad click-through rates.
FORM, a task management tool for frontline teams, saw a significant lift in CTR from using interactive demos firsthand.
After creating multiple Navattic tours (one for each of their products and capabilities) and launching them on PPC landing pages, the FORM team saw a 33% increase in conversion.
Even better, their "Take a Tour" CTAs decreased their cost per lead by nearly 50%.
Want to learn how to add demos to paid ads?
Here are 3 ways to do it with 3 real examples: Ad Best Practices for Product Demos
Use case 3: Event & webinar follow-ups
Your prospects probably aren’t going to re-listen to the webinars you recorded or remember everything you talked about at a conference.
Instead of sending slides, recordings, or boring one-pagers, send them an interactive demo. To maximize your click-through rate, also include:
- Bullet points to remind prospects how your product meets their needs.
- What users should expect to see in your demo.
- Other helpful collateral tailored to their needs.
- A clear call to action.
You could also reach out to accounts who attended the conference but didn’t get an opportunity to interact with your demo.
Try running retargeted ads, such as Google Ads or LinkedIn ads, using compliant email addresses you collected or the conference attendee list. An interactive demo ad may be the push they need to learn more about your product and will keep it top of mind.
Don’t forget to keep a close eye on your Navattic’s analytics — you’ll be able to see what parts of your product resonate most with prospects, giving you more ideas for what to feature in a webinar or conference talk and how to improve your demos over time.
For more conference interactive demo ideas, check out:
6 Tips to Prepare Perfect Conference Software Demos
Customer Show + Tell: Kristen Graves Hoppe: Demos at Conference Booths
Middle of funnel
Prospects at this stage are actively evaluating solutions.
As opposed to other MOFU content, interactive demos provide deeper insights into your product’s capabilities, helping potential customers see how it addresses their specific pain points.
Use case 1: Demo centers & resource libraries
It’s impossible to know what every prospect is looking for in your product.
Creating a hub of multiple demos — filterable by use case, buyer persona, or product feature — lets prospects explore what’s most interesting to them at their own pace.
Demo centers are most useful if:
- You sell to multiple audiences or use cases
- Your product has multiple features or functionalities
- You want to highlight product integrations
Looking for some examples?
We’ve got 6 (and some helpful hints) here: What is a Demo Center?
Resource libraries and help articles are another ideal place for interactive demos, showing, rather than telling, prospects and customers how a specific feature works.
Use case 2: Email nurture campaigns
If you’ve already got someone’s email, chances are they are somewhat interested in your product.
Keep their attention by sending them useful and engaging emails. For example, instead of sending a static case study, send them an interactive walkthrough of a customer’s instance or particular feature.
If you’re nurturing free trialers, try inserting mini-tutorial interactive demos — each with just a few steps — in your emails that push them toward the action you want them to take next.
To incorporate interactive demos in your outbound emails, read: Email Marketing Strategies for Product Demos
Use case 3: Sales outreach & SDR enablement
SDRs can use interactive demos in cold outreach and follow-up emails to stand out and promote engagement.
For our customer Coupa, “Sharing interactive demos as a leave-behind enables decision makers to revisit our value messaging even when we’re not physically present and easily share the resource internally.
This has been an efficient way to communicate the key features and benefits of Coupa, helping us accelerate our sales process.”
But in order for SDRs to create effective interactive demos, they have to know how your product works. Turns out, interactive demos can help with that, too.
Sydney Lawson at Athennian shares: “Interactive demos have been really useful tools — not only for ensuring user adoption but for further enablement for our own internal teams.”
Every time a new salesperson joins the team, they can learn the ins and outs of your product (and even newly-released features) through interactive demos.
For more on sales outreach, check out: How to Use Interactive Demos for Sales Leave Behinds
Bottom of funnel
B2B buyers expect a highly tailored buying experience — especially if they’ve already browsed your content, seen an ad or two, and chatted with a BDR.
Interactive demos provide hands-on engagement aligning with their specific needs.
Use Case 1: Personalized sales demos
A case study about a company of a similar size in a similar industry is a good proof point.
An interactive demo that highlights the most relevant features to a prospect’s specific use case? A far more compelling proof point.
Sales enablement platform, Dooly, personalizes interactive demos to convey how and why high-value prospects would benefit from using the tool in their day-to-day.
“Receiving a demo on a feature you were most interested in feels more personalized than just an email or one-pager and is just as scalable for our team to share.”
Learn how to customize your demos to each buyer: How to Personalize Demos for ABM Campaigns
Use Case 2: Demos as a post-call follow-up
Giving your fans a demo to show their colleagues increases your chances of winning over the naysayers — faster.
Sourceday, a modern purchase order management platform, uses Navattic to give product overviews to champions earlier in the sales funnel.
“We are using these demos to enable champions to position the product internally without the need for multiple product demos throughout the sales cycle.”
Navattic’s Launchpad makes this strategy more scalable, allowing your sales team to:
- Pull templated demos from a chrome extension
- Customize them for each prospect.
- Embed them in emails and decks.
On the backend, reps can see where prospects spend the most time — a great place to start their next conversation.
Use Case 3: Proposal & ROI presentations
What you send buyers as they’re deciding between your product and another can make or break a sale.
Reinforce your value props and show ROI by embedding interactive demos into your sales decks and asking champions to share them widely.
When buyers see exactly what they get with your product, they can make a decision faster and with more confidence.
Use Case 4: Proof-of-Concept (POC) support
Many buyers insist on getting their own sandbox. But sometimes, those demo environments can come with a complex setup — and that doesn’t always leave a great first impression.
With self-guided demos, you can make the process more seamless, showing prospects exactly what to do and nudging them toward all the aha moments you want them to experience.
This helps them get the most out of their POC and reduces friction in the decision-making process.
And you’d be surprised by what you can recreate.
Jakub Suchy at HAProxy, for example, has used Navattic plus a mix of AI tools and emulators to build interactive demos of Visual Studio Code, the Windows interface, Mac’s Finder, and other tough-to-replicate command-line interfaces.
Alexander Yant at Slope takes interactive demo environments a step further, customizing each demo with personalization variables.
“As soon as somebody comes to us, we can plug in their research site. So they see their name on the page, their title, and their site in the demo environment. It gives it a much more, not only personalized but warmer experience.”
Dive further into POC demo building:
Customer Show + Tell: Jakub Suchy: Demonstrating Technical Interfaces
Customer Show + Tell: Personalized Demo Environments with Alexander Yant
Bonus Use Case: G2 and other review sites
There’s one more use case we think has huge upside: review sites.
Review sites are one of the first places prospects visit in their vendor research. While powerful messaging, screenshots, and positive customer feedback can help influence a buyer’s decision, your review site profiles may not highlight the full scope of what your product can do.
Even videos don’t do your product justice. Plus, they’re tough to maintain — every time you update your product, it costs time and money to produce a new, accurate piece of content.
You can overcome those issues and get prospects’ hands on your product faster by adding Navattic demos to your G2 and TrustRadius profiles.
Inserting interactive demos in your product listings only takes a few steps.
Read our play-by-play: How to add Interactive Demos to G2 and TrustRadius