Top Use Cases for Interactive Demos in 2024

Did you know that the average Navattic customer builds 20 interactive demos?

If you’ve built out your first demo and want advice for creating your next 19, we’ve got you.

In this post, you’ll find the most common use cases for interactive demos from our State of the Interactive Product Demo Report, along with tips for getting started.

When we looked at the top 1% of demos built on our platform, five use cases stood out.

As you might guess, websites were the most popular — over 60% of demos were embedded on home or product pages.

But we also saw an increase in the use of interactive demos across the entire GTM funnel, from marketing to sales to onboarding. Below, we’ll cover the top 5 use cases — and a bonus one not mentioned in the report.

Website

Adding interactive demos to your website offers two main benefits:

1. They give your prospects a chance to do their own research without talking to sales
2. They increase your website’s efficiency

In today’s B2B buying market, fewer and fewer people want to talk to sales right away. G2 discovered that over 60% of buyers agree and strongly agree that vendor sales aren’t involved in the research phase of their product evaluations.

But it’s tough to educate customers without hopping on a call or forcing them into a free trial or freemium account — where they may not hit the aha moments you’re hoping for.

Product tours remove that risk, showing your product exactly as you want it to look without having to interact directly with a prospect.

In our customer interview series with senior product marketer Aston Whiteling, he explained,

“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.”

In fact, they’re so engaging that 40% - 60% of website visitors interact with a Navattic demo if it’s prevalent on a landing page.

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

In-Product

Configuring permissions, installing integrations, and people’s overall busyness can be huge barriers to user activation and adoption.

Interactive demos nudge people in the right direction, getting them excited about how your product can make their lives better and easier.

There are two ways to add interactive demos to your product onboarding or upsell flow:

1. Email sequences
2. In-app pop-ups for new features or upsell products In-app notifications

You can set up the second mechanism (no-code required) using our integration with Chameleon, a product adoption platform. When activated, free trialers or freemium users have the option to “See Demo” before diving in, making setup far less overwhelming.

Read more here: How to Use Interactive Demos for In-App Activation

Help Center

You want your product documentation to be easily digestible and accessible. But that’s hard to do when everyone learns differently.

Some people prefer reading in-depth articles; others want to see your product in action.

Interactive demos give users another option — part text-based tips, part hands-on use of your product. This one-two punch can reduce the need for one-on-one training.

Navattic customer Spot.ai explains, “Our self-serve training demos are presented alongside videos to provide additional options for content types.

These self-serve training options have significantly reduced the need for our Success reps to train individual users on the platform on calls.”

Another customer, SourceDay, had similar outcomes after adding interactive demos to their training workflows: “With Navattic product tours deployed for user enablement, our onboarding and training team is seeing a 90% decrease in the number of one-on-one trainings needed to activate new users.”

But customers aren’t the only ones who need to get up to speed on your product.

New GTM hires need to learn the ins and outs of your product to market and sell it effectively. And they need to continue learning about new features as they are released.

Sydney Lawson, Product Marketing Manager 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."

Read more here: How to Use Interactive Demos for Help Centers, Onboarding, and Training

Feature Launch

Publishing a quick blog post isn’t enough to get the word out about a new feature these days. But taking an omnichannel approach can feel like a lot of work.

Interactive demos simplify the process, showing customers the new feature instead of telling them how it works.

Navattic customers have included interactive demos in their feature announcement:

• LinkedIn posts
• Emails
• Blogs
• Newsletters
• Release notes
• Academies
• Product Hunt pages

Adding more interactive demos to your product content drives prospect engagement and promotes user adoption, encouraging existing customers to jump in and use the new feature.

For examples, check out: 6 Feature Announcement Examples from SaaS Companies

Sales Enablement

Your prospects probably aren’t re-listening to the calls you recorded. So, how else can you move them through the funnel?

Instead of outdated one-pagers or slides, consider sending prospects an interactive demo specifically tailored to the features they seem interested in. Doing this increases the chances of conversion in two ways.

The first is by reducing meetings. B2B buyers want to minimize time spent on the phone. Pointing them to your product’s value prop without having to book a call still keeps your product top of mind and helps reiterate its value.

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.”

Sending a tailored demo also enables your champions to sell your product internally. As the folks at Coupa hinted in their interview, interactive demos are an excellent resource for the people who really want to buy your product.

Giving your champions engaging materials to show their colleagues increases your chances of winning over the blockers — faster.

Sourceday, a modern purchase order management platform, leverages Navattic to give confident and consistent 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.”

Get 3 ideas and 3 examples here: How to Use Interactive Demos for Sales Leave Behinds

There’s one more use case we think has great potential to elevate your sales cycle.

G2 and 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 their decision, they may not highlight the full scope of what your product can do.

Even videos don’t do your product justice. And 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.

Inserting interactive demos in your product listings takes just a few simple steps.

Read our play-by-play: How to add Interactive Demos to G2 and TrustRadius

Curious what else we found in our interactive demo research?

Read our full State of the Interactive Product Demo Report here.