With a growing demand for virtual experiences and digital marketing in 2023, one of the best tools you can implement into your sales cycle is an interactive product tour. These interactive tours of your product provide potential customers with an engaging and immersive experience, allowing them to explore the product's features and how its functionality can solve crucial pain points. These interactive demos entail excellent benefits for your sales and presales teams with improved user engagement, effective onboarding and access to invaluable analytics and insights, helping your team make the right decisions.

Here at Demoboost, we offer the ultimate sales enablement tool to engage your prospects and enhance your demo delivery. Incorporating Demoboost into your sales and marketing processes can help you and your team create customizable demos fit for unique personas and use cases. You can also create demo libraries, shortening the time to demo and providing prospects with tailored leave-behinds that turn your champion into a hero. Best of all, you can consistently create high-quality interactive product demos that showcase the true potential and benefit of your product.

In this article, we define interactive product tours, outline why they're crucial for your company, provide some interactive product tour use cases and discuss how to create an effective interactive product tour. 

What are interactive product tours?

Interactive product tours are a type of interactive product demo that are available on demand and takes your prospect through a guided tour of your product's features and functionalities. You can use these demos to showcase the key features of your product or service in an engaging and interactive way. You can also customize interactive tours and tailor them to the specific needs and interests of the prospect, helping you engage them while displaying the product's capabilities for solving pain points. Interactive product tours may include elements such as text or video guides, images and videos that provide additional information and context, ensuring your prospects don't get lost while exploring the multitude of product offerings. 

Above all, an interactive product tour is a 100% clone of your product interface, including all interactive elements like drop downs or pop ups, demonstrating the product's capabilities in a real-world scenario. It's important to note an interactive product tour may have varying names, such as an on-demand interactive demo, a top of the funnel demo or a value-in-use showcase. Regardless of the name, interactive product tours help users experience the benefits for themselves whilst receiving personalized and tailored guidance that illuminates the product's value and ability to solve pain points. An interactive product demo is essentially the closest your prospects can get to a personal meeting with a sales representative. 

Why an interactive product tour is important

An interactive product tour is important for your company in more ways than one. With the increasing demand for virtual experiences and the clear benefits of enhanced digital marketing, providing your prospects with interactive tours is almost a necessity for competing with emerging SaaS companies. Increasing your competitiveness is only one of many reasons an interactive product tour is essential in your sales operation. Below, you can explore some of these other reasons:

Increases customer engagement

An interactive product tour allows customers to interact with the product in real time, giving them a more immersive experience than traditional product demos or static product images. By allowing customers to interact with the software product and explore its features and functionalities, you can improve user engagement and increase the likelihood of a sale. You can also use interactive product tours to tell a story about the product, showcasing its features and benefits in a way that's engaging and memorable. By conveying a compelling story through the product tour, you can capture the customer's attention and increase engagement.

Using interactive and feedback elements in your product tour, such as pop-ups and tooltips, can provide immediate feedback to the customer, helping them understand the product's features and functionalities better. This feedback often increases engagement, as the customer feels more connected to the product and more confident in their understanding of its capabilities. With features like a video narrative and comments, the prospects can build rapport with the sales rep even before they meet them. They can also start a conversation and start engaging before opting into the sales process. Thanks to these unique features, Demoboost achieved a median completion rate of 88% and demo NPD of 89!

Improves product understanding

An interactive tour can increase your prospects' product understanding of your product by providing a more immersive, contextualized and personalized experience that allows customers to explore the product's features and functionalities in greater detail. By demonstrating the product's capabilities in relevant contexts and providing immediate feedback, you can help your prospects understand the product's value proposition and make more informed purchasing decisions. Contextualization and simulations are elements of a product tour that often improve the prospects' understanding of the product.

Contextualized product tours provide context for the product's features and functionalities, helping your prospects understand how they fit into real-world scenarios and how they solve real-world issues. Simulations can add to the context of your product, allowing prospects to test the product's features and functionalities in a safe and controlled environment. This can improve product understanding by helping the prospects identify how the product works in practice. After experiencing an on-demand interactive product tour, the prospect enters the sales process as an educated buyer, which ultimately speeds up the sales cycle. 

Provides customizable and tailored experiences

A primary issue with traditional demos is that by the time an organization tailored their demos to their prospects, it was far too late in the sales process. Through an on-demand interactive tour, you can provide tailored experiences to prospects at any time throughout the sales process, allowing them to explore the features and functionalities that are most relevant to their interests or use cases. Interactive tours may also involve user-controlled navigation functionality, allowing customers to explore your product at their own pace and in their own order, typically leading to improved engagement and a memorable experience.

Personalization options and software integration capabilities may also help provide prospects with a more memorable and tailored experience. An interesting addition to an interactive tour is the integration of the product with other software and tools the prospect uses, such as social media and communication tools. This helps customers identify the potential of your product and how it can seamlessly integrate with their existing infrastructure.

Helps differentiate your products

An interactive product tour can highlight the unique features of your software product that set it apart from competitors. Buyers typically begin their purchasing journey by identifying a problem and seeking out potential solutions. At this early stage, which accounts for approximately 60% of the purchase decision-making process, they are receptive to new ideas and information. Offering readily available interactive demos, as opposed to competitors who do not, gives you a significant competitive edge by engaging potential customers during the most crucial and influential part of the decision-making process.

Apart from comprehensive product coverage and tailored tours, you can also include targeted messaging. An interactive product tour can allow you to conduct targeted messaging to specific prospects, personas, segments and use cases. This highlights how your software product is tailored specifically to meet the needs of your prospects, which competitor software demos might not provide. By showing how your software product can solve specific problems or meet specific needs better than competitors, you can differentiate your product in the eyes of potential customers.

Provides invaluable analytics and insights

An interactive product tour provides you with valuable analytics and insights that can help you understand your customers, improve your products and services and increase sales and conversions. Product tour software solutions, like Demoboost, provide you with an abundance of features for tracking metrics, collecting user feedback, tracking user behaviours, performing A/B testing and tracking conversions. For example, you can track top performing demos, demo completion rates, conversion rates, most popular features on a page and specific prospect interests. 

With a static demo or demo recording, you have no idea what features your prospects are exploring, but with an interactive tour, you can track their usage, providing insights into the features and functions of your product that solve their pain points. An interactive demo might also provide users with the opportunity to offer feedback and suggestions, which can help you understand customer needs and preferences and identify product areas for potential improvement.

Interactive product tour use cases

An interactive product tour isn't just exclusive to sales. You can use product tours for a multitude of use cases, including product launches, customer support, leave-behind demos, onboarding and training and marketing campaigns. Below, you can explore several use cases for an interactive product tour:

Embedded tours on your website

You can integrate a comprehensive interactive product tour on your website, allowing visitors to interact with your product without leaving the website. This provides visitors to your website with a seamless and integrated user experience. Apart from showcasing your product, an embedded product tour can improve user experience, increase website engagement, improve conversion rates and provide additional analytics for your sales team to analyse. 

Marketing campaigns

An interactive product tour can be a valuable tool for marketing campaigns, providing an engaging and interactive way for potential customers to explore your product's features and functionalities. By customizing the experience, providing education and increasing engagement, you can improve the success of your marketing campaigns, leading to significant growth of MQLs generated. 

You can include an interactive product tour for a marketing campaign launching a new product, showcasing the product's unique features and benefits to generate excitement and interest among potential customers. You can also amplify your social media marketing campaigns by sharing an interactive tour on social media platforms, increasing brand awareness and showcasing the product's value proposition. 

Outbound outreach

Outbound outreach, also known as outbound marketing or outbound sales, is a proactive approach to reaching out to potential customers or clients. Business development representatives (BDRs) can utilize an interactive product tour by linking to the demo during discussions with prospective customers. This typically results in a positive reaction from customers, as they feel the value exchange is fair, allowing them to identify the true value of the product in the discussion. 

Leave behind demos

The perfect solution for maintaining prospect engagement after a live demo and turning your champion into a hero is a leave-behind demo. But, if you truly want to take your sales game to the next level, consider creating interactive leave-behind demos. An interactive leave-behind can increase customer engagement by providing a more immersive and interactive experience than traditional leave-behind demos. 

A common mistake is an assumption that your champion is the sole decision-maker. In most business-to-business sales scenarios, there can be up to 20 individuals involved in the decision-making process. An interactive leave-behind can convert not only your champion but all the decision-makers involved.

Onboarding and training

An interactive product tour isn't only beneficial for closing deals, it can also be an excellent onboarding and training tool. A product tour for training purposes can provide new employees with a hands-on learning experience, allowing them to explore the product's features and capabilities with step-by-step guidance. You can customize the product tour to the specific needs and interests of new employees, providing a more tailored and interactive experience that matches their specific use cases and learning styles.

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Create an effective interactive product tour with Demoboost

Creating an interactive product tour is often harder than it sounds. There are many obstacles and challenges to overcome, such as ensuring a positive user experience, creating consistently high-quality demos, finding technical expertise and delivering demos efficiently. Before revolutionary tools, like Demoboost, sales teams might spend weeks and months creating high-quality demos, let alone an entire library of demos to suit a range of personas and use cases. Sales engineers would often be called away from important customer-facing duties to spend time creating technical and complex demos, leading to increased labour costs and opportunity costs, revealing an inability to scale sales operations.

With Demoboost by your side, you can essentially overcome every obstacle interfering with your demo deliveries. Demoboost is the ultimate sales enablement tool, allowing sales engineers with minimal technical experience in front-end technologies to create outstanding and high-quality interactive demos for a variety of use cases. You can also ensure prospects only receive high-quality and specifically tailored demos in record times, thanks to the implementation of a demo library. The library stores countless demos that you can customize and tailor to unique prospect personas and market segments.

Impress your prospects, show the true value of your product, enable your sales and pre-sales teams and reduce sales costs with Demoboost. Book a demo today!