With modern businesses increasingly relying on technology, the SaaS niche has scaled rapidly in recent years. A Gartner report noted a 16.3% growth in this market in 2020, reaching a whopping $105.6 billion.
However, this popularity has also made it a cutthroat industry. To stand out in this crowd, your product needs unique features, refined UX, specialized solutions, and scalability.
But how do you prove these qualities to the customers without a physical product? Your answer lies in interactive product demos.
Text-based product descriptions with a few screenshots may just bore your prospects. But a properly curated interactive product demo showcases your functionalities through a hands-on experience. Moreover, it’s a time-efficient method to communicate your value and shorten your sales cycle.
Seems tricky? It doesn’t have to be. Here are 5 best interactive product demo examples along with tips to create one for your SaaS brand.
What is an Interactive Product Demo?
An interactive product demo is a presentation that walks customers through the features and functionalities of your products. The goal is to provide an immersive and personalized experience and let the prospects assess its suitability for their business.
Customers can click on the screen prompts and try out your platform’s UX in real time, bridging the gap between vague claims and hands-on understanding. Moreover, interactive product demos:
- Drive engagement
- Eliminate the need for long sales calls
- Nudge customers to explore your other solutions
- Help prospects make informed decisions
What Makes an Effective Interactive Product Demo?
According to TrustRadius, 100% of buyers today expect self-service across their entire buying journey — and interactive product demos are perfect for that. In fact, the same report quoted them as one of the top 5 information sources in the SaaS market.
However, to achieve tangible results, your product demos must have certain qualities. These characteristics include:
- Realistic simulations with clickable buttons to let users experience its benefits firsthand
- Engaging visuals like videos and animations showcasing the product’s aesthetics and functionality
- Proper customizations for tailored experiences based on unique business needs
- Compelling narrative that highlights the essential features and leaves a lasting impression
- Responsive design for a smooth fit in different devices
Tips to Create Interactive Product Demos
Complicated demos can backfire and frustrate your prospects. Here are a few tips to create one that accurately represents your services and impresses customers:
- Assess your target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. Tailor the demos addressing those specific challenges.
- An intuitive and clean interface is key to engaging the audience. So, keep the navigation free of clutter and unnecessary complexities.
- Prioritize showcasing your unique selling points and important features with clickable buttons and realistic simulations.
- Design the demo as a step-by-step guide with bite-sized experiences for better comprehension.
- Use images, animations, and infographics to detail complex parts of your demonstration.
- Show before-and-after scenarios to emphasize how your product solves real-world problems.
Tools to Create Winning Interactive Product Demos
To create an on-brand and interactive product demo, you need reliable tools. Here are some options worth considering:
Walnut
Walnut is a demonstration design platform. This nifty software captures your product in seconds and customizes each aspect exactly the way you want.
Users can apply bulk changes, update images and graphics, and redact customer information. You also get buyer insights and demo performance tracking in a centralized dashboard.
Navvatic
Navvatic offers impressive features for product demo curation.
The highlight functionalities include frontend copies of your existing demo environment, overlay guides, customizable designs, and shareable links. You can embed the demos directly on your website as well.
Storylane
Want to leverage narrative-driven product demos? With Storylane, you can add custom HTML, highlight products with advanced widgets, and offer tailored workflows — all in one platform.
5 Best Interactive Product Demo Examples
Enough with the theory. If you still aren’t convinced as to how these demos will help your business, let’s look at some of the best examples to run the magic by you.
1. Ignition
The interactive demo on Ignition’s website starts with a specialist in the field, communicating with the prospects directly. This sets a personal tone for the experience and engages the audience from the very start.
The demo prepares the users with an overview by walking them through a number of steps at the beginning. This offers a sneak peek of the software’s different features. Finally, the demo ends with a strong CTA button to nudge conversion.
Ignition’s interactive product demo is simple, immersive, and visually appealing. It makes the audience want to explore their solutions more and give the trial a go.
2. Dooly
Dooly’s product demo is the perfect example of customer-oriented and convenient SaaS demonstrations.
The brand has a ‘Dooly in action’ page with 6 separate demos, designed to represent a separate product feature. This segmentation format works better than displaying all the information in one single presentation.
Instead of going through a long demo with a clutter of irrelevant features, it lets viewers try the functionalities they need. Each demo has about 10 steps, making the duration perfect even for the busiest prospects.
3. Stairwell
Stairwell uses engaging visuals with interactive elements. It has extensive filters to let prospects search for a specific feature for a hassle-free experience.
The demo uses checklists that enable the users to complete the key steps involved, ensuring that the prospects don’t miss certain key steps.
Stairwell’s demo transitions seamlessly to highlight the comprehensive security services.
4. AngelList
AngelList takes a unique approach to product demos by embedding pop-up boxes in blog articles. The prospects get to see new features without shifting to another page, making the experience convenient and time-efficient.
This method is more suitable for businesses that want to display their features without making the audience find a separate landing page. It also emphasizes the blog’s value with hands-on interactive presentations.
The demos are activated once the user clicks the overlay; so, it’s less intrusive to the reading experience as well.
5. Bill
Bill presents its interactive demos with six sections. The audience can easily toggle between them through an index at the lower right bottom of the interface.
With 10-12 stepped sections, the experience is clutter-free and quick.
Their demo takes the engagement up a notch with a storyline. It shows how a business owner and her manager use Bill to tackle their business challenges. This before-and-after effect convinces prospects of its capabilities, while the narrative makes them connect with the simulation.
Finally, the demo shows a CTA prompt at the end of each segment, which takes the prospects directly to the product registration form. It heightens the chances of conversions and cuts down on the sales cycle.
Explore Interactive Product Demos
With the right design and embedding strategies, interactive product demos can be a game changer for your SaaS marketing. Use the above-mentioned examples as inspiration to create an immersive demonstration experience for your prospects. Highlight your unique selling points and make sure your demos represent a solution-oriented approach.
About the Author
Sneha Chatterjee is a freelance writer specializing in writing data-driven content for B2B SaaS and marketing brands. With her content, she helps present their product as the go to solution for their audience’s pain points. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
