Successfully showing your product at marketing events and trade shows can be a challenge for software companies. Presenting the product live can lead to demo fails, unwanted data revelations, and more.
Interactive demo solutions like Walnut allow you to solve these concerns.
Why should you use demos during marketing events and trade shows?
Use interactive demos to present your product and how it solves your prospects’ pains. You can use Walnut to show the product when presenting live in a session, and add a short, guided demo in your booth to directly convert high-intent leads.
By creating a demo for your trade show, you can impress your buyers and quickly direct them to the “aha!” moment for your product. This way, you can make your product remarkable and convert buyers to leads faster. Present demos live during the event or session with confidence that no bugs will interrupt and that no personal data will accidentally be shared.
How it solves your buyers’ pains:
Buyers are often blind to product value and are less aware of what you can do for them.
How it solves your team’s pains:
Your team may be unable to show the product properly at events that can expedite prospects’ decision-making.
How to create interactive demos for marketing events and trade shows with Walnut
Create
- Tailor the narrative to the audience.
Tailor your demo to fit the context of the event. It can be a specific new product line you want to present or a dedicated target audience that you want to speak to. For example, if it’s a conference, take into account that potential prospects are less aware of what you do. However, at customer events, you can jump more quickly into business.
2. Keep it short and to the point.
At these types of events, the attention span is low. We recommend building a demo that is short and to the point. Avoid generic areas of your product like sign up, company settings, or even showing exactly step-by-step how to do things. You can create dedicated Walnut demos as backups to handle questions and objections, but for the main presentation, we recommend skipping these parts.
3. Focus on differentiation.
Your competitors will also be at these types of events. So, make sure that within the first minute of the demo, you’re able to communicate why your product is unique.
4. Avoid replications.
We recommend basing your demo on one or two product paths or personas and not actually replicating your product. This way you avoid confusing your audience and ensure that the person who presents the demo controls the narrative.
5. Make sure you anonymize customer data.
Make sure you aren’t sharing any customer data or sensitive information. You can use the Find and Replace feature to look for this data and change it.
6. Choose your characters and stick with them.
To improve presentations and make them feel real, we recommend choosing people that will be the users.
7. Choose how you want the presenter to navigate through the presentation.
Typically, when presenting a demo live on calls or at events, the best practice is to do a non-guided demo, where the presenter is freely guiding people. A trick to direct the flow is to consider adding a guide that is fully used with “beacons”, which are the small spots that show people where to click if you want to keep the exact step-by-step narrative.
8. Make it feel authentic and smooth.
Deliver an experience that feels like the real thing. You can use the Smart Object feature to bulk link logos, menus, images, and more, and Recorded Interactions to show drop-downs, menus, and transition between screen elements.
9. Use Presenter Notes.
Guide your presenter on what should be said at each stage. Don’t worry, only the presenter will see these notes.
10. Set the right screen size.
Make sure you know on which screen the demo is going to be displayed. You can use the Display Screens feature to adjust it quickly to the size you need.
Bonus:
11. Consider using an additional short, guided demo for your booth.
You can place a computer in your booth with your demo ready to play. Make it a guided 10-step demo showing one aspect of your product. Embed a form to collect leads so you can quickly follow up with these leads.
Deliver / Distribute
1. Once you finish editing, create a demo from the template.
2. Make sure you remove any email collection or access permissions from the live demo.
3. Test the demo on the screen you plan to present on and ensure everything runs as you imagined.
4. If you collected leads through a separate list or the mini ‘try on your own’ demo, we recommend sending a follow-up email with a guided Walnut demo to increase their intent and keep the ball rolling.
5. Make sure you generate a dedicated demo link per demo to efficiently track its performance. (You can do it easily by creating a demo from the template.)
Track
1. Track your demo in our Insights section to see who viewed your demo, for how long, and which parts were most interesting.
2. See collected leads in your CRM, using our CRM integration.
Demo points to track
- Demo time – How long did the pitch take? You can see this by checking the time spent on the demo. You want to make sure that for these events, the demos are not too long.
- Demo view/total traffic – It’s a good idea to measure total viewers of your demo compared to total session attendees or booth visitors. If you see the percentage is lower, consider changing the narrative to fit the audience.
- Conversion from demo to book a meeting – Track how many people converted from the demo.
What you’ll need
- Product narrative.
- Create a report in Salesforce
