Your go-to-market strategy—is it looking a little stale in 2023? Looking for ways to expand your GTM motion for your next new product, new feature, or new service? You don’t need to rely on the tried and tested (and tired) old funnel model.
We’ve got four creative ideas for you to test out in your next GTM plan that all harness the incredible power of interactive product demos for product marketers.
Let’s go!
1. Make your demos self-serve
Buyers today love to research on their own. According to Gartner, when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers. This means that 83% of their buying journey is self-guided.
Enabling the self-serve buyer journey can take many forms, but one of the best ways to include in your GTM strategy is creating more interactive product tours on your website. You can feature self-guided interactive demos on your product pages, feature pages, or within blog content so prospects can experience the value of your product earlier and more often.
If you’re thinking, “hmm, this sounds like product-led growth”—yes! It’s a form of PLG, which is so much more than just free trials or freemium offerings. Those can be a great part of your GTM strategy for many businesses, but if your product is complex or hard to onboard, they’re not always ideal.
Adding in website demos (and ungate your product experience where you can!) lets your product speak for, and sell, itself. That’s what product-led growth is all about.
2. Speak directly to your target customers
Create interactive demos tailored to the people your strategy has determined will be stakeholders in the purchase decision. Some of the people involved could be an end user, an influencer or champion who is driving the process, and final decision makers like an executive approver and budget controller.
Understanding their roles, objectives, pain points, and any gatekeepers who might be blocking the purchase along the way is critical here. You should spend time thinking through the best way to convince each of these people in the sales cycle when you’re creating your GTM strategy, and then determine how to reach them.
Since an average of 11 people are involved in a typical B2B buying process (with as many as 20 involved in some cases), figuring out how to speak effectively to each persona is critical.
Interactive product demos can be very effective here—perhaps you create a customized bite-sized product demo for your sales team to send to a champion. They can share it with the buying committee instead of waiting for everyone to jump on a sales call. You can also create a leave-behind demo for prospects after a sales call instead of sending them a one-pager they’ll never read.
3. Test out your product messaging
If you use a demo platform like Reprise that enables marketing leaders to create demos without developer involvement, you can play around with them to test out how different product messages land with your intended audience.
For example, let’s say you’re launching a new product and developing your GTM strategy. But you’re not sure which messaging will be most effective because it’s a new area for your business—which pain points and product value messages will resonate the most with your buyer personas?
You can experiment with multiple demos approaching your product from several angles. Perhaps you create a demo for each pain point, distribute them on your website or through your other channels like email marketing or social, and see which ones get the most leads and engagement.
Then, you can continue to refine your demos with analytics you get from your Interactive demo creation platform (you’re using one, right?). See what’s working, where prospects are exiting your demo, and where they’re exploring so you can tailor accordingly. And with the right demo software, editing your demos takes only a few clicks, so you can make changes and move on to your next task.
4. Send a demo in your next email marketing campaign
Email marketing is amazingly effective, but too often, SaaS companies make it pretty boring. You don’t need to wait for a prospect to visit your website or book a sales call to show them what your product can do—you can send it right to their email inbox.
This is especially handy when you segment your email lists by personas. You can send tailored demos to each persona list to target their individual pain points and concerns without having to create a totally custom demo for each prospect. It’s efficient, scaleable, and effective too.
Emailing prospects interactive demos also makes sales multithreading easier and more effective. Your prospects can forward the demo to anyone they think might want to take a look, whether that’s someone else at their organization who’s a better fit or the head of their buying committee. Shareable demos mean a wider pool of engaged buyers, and that makes a more successful GTM motion.
Nailing your GTM motion with interactive demos
Using interactive demos throughout the entire customer journey is a great idea regardless of the specifics of your GTM strategy. Sure, you could use product demo videos instead, but they’re expensive to create, hard to update, and pretty outdated at this point. And showing prospects screenshots of your tech product is not very tech-forward in 2023.
Interactive product demos allow buyers to explore and experience their product on their own without any gatekeeping or friction—and that makes them more likely to buy. In fact, McKinsey research shows that more than 70% of businesses will happily consider other vendors if their core “must haves” are not met during their buying journey, or if the experience is poor.
Interactive demos can also accelerate time-to-value, drive greater conversions, shorten your sales cycles, and generate more revenue. Sound too good to be true? Don’t take our word for it—Forrester found that using Reprise led to 50% more conversions, increased marketing staff productivity by 50%, reduced time in the sales cycle, and had a stunning 323% ROI.
Make your go-to-market strategy more effective with the ease of a demo creation platform like Reprise. We’re the only enterprise-class demo creation platform that brings interactive product tours and live demos that deliver accelerated value and drive action—check out how we help product marketers like you today!
