Have you noticed that today's B2B software products are packed to the gills with features that cater to different industries and user roles? This built-in complexity can make onboarding and user engagement challenging. To tackle this, sales, product, and marketing teams often use tools like product tours. These guided, interactive walkthroughs simplify the onboarding process and enhance user engagement throughout the customer lifecycle by helping users navigate key features.
Product tours play a crucial role in helping users understand the core functionality of a software product quickly. They showcase the benefits and value at every stage, from the initial trial period to the adoption of advanced features. It's no surprise that 40% of software buyers find product demonstrations to be the most helpful factor in their purchasing decisions.
However, product tours can be limited in scope and may not always provide the level of interactivity that some software products need. Before diving into the most compelling examples used by well-known software companies, it's important to define what product tours are and why they are so valuable to software marketers.
What Are Product Tours, and Why Are They Important?
Product tours are one of the most common forms of user onboarding and education, especially when it comes to complex software products. Typically presented to potential customers or new users when they first log in, the product tour aims to introduce the viewer to the software's key features and encourage them to acquire or use it.
Unlike an interactive demo environment, a product tour is a guided walkthrough of the product highlights, often overlaid onto the product UI or presented as a video or slideshow of screenshots with accompanying explanations. Product tours focus on showcasing the capabilities of web applications or software services to a broad audience and are essential to B2B sales enablement, software marketing, and user engagement strategies.
Benefits of Product Tours
Product tours take on a number of roles in the user engagement strategy of B2B software companies. Their benefits include:
- On-demand training and comprehensive interface overviews without the aid of sales or support personnel make product tours a cost-effective type of product documentation and marketing materials.
- Low cost and high speed of production are particularly attractive benefits of product tours since they are relatively simple to create, and don't always require specialized tools or services.
- Versatile formats of product tours make them very accessible to most companies. They can be videos, slide shows, or basic web app overlays that walk users through a predefined series of steps.
- Easy sharing is vital for your marketing, sales, and support teams when employing any customer-facing document or tool. Product tours are usually shared in familiar formats and don't require specialized knowledge or applications to view.
- A unified walkthrough experience across target audiences, client categories, and business teams helps create a cohesive knowledge-sharing experience, even though it may not be perfectly customized or suited to the needs and knowledge of specific viewers.
6 Product Tour Examples that Boost Usage
Here are six examples of effective product tours used by leading software companies that help boost product usage:
1. Asana
Asana is a versatile project management platform that helps teams organize and prioritize their tasks while enabling smooth collaboration across departments. Upon signup and login, users are prompted to create their first project and accompanying tasks. They are walked through key steps in project management features like setting deadlines, task owners, and project teams.
But the product tour doesn't end there. After setup is complete and the user is familiar with the basics, the tour aims to provide ongoing support by using tooltip hotspots to drive user attention to a mix of resources like video tutorials, best practices, and in-app tips.
Another element that makes Asana's product tour a great example is that it's role-based, so it presents users with features and capabilities relevant to their specific role in the organization.
2. Jira
Another popular project management tool that's traditionally used by software development companies and teams is Atlassian's Jira. Among its helpful features are agile project management tools, user story mapping, ticketing, and issue tracking.
Showcasing this wealth of features is no easy task, but Jira pulls it off nicely. It introduces users to its platform with a slideout walkthrough. This process begins with a brief presentation at first login, outlining the key features and helping users get familiar with the product.
Dubbed a "Quickstart" menu, Jira's slideout product tour offers contextual tips throughout the interface. It allows users to deep dive into specific features when they need to, without being overloaded with information that's unnecessary for doing their jobs.
3. Grammarly
One of the most popular writing assistant SaaS tools, Grammarly aids users in writing and proofing texts for spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, and more. Grammarly's product tour stands out for its interactivity, making it a great example of a usage and engagement-boosting tool. The tour begins as soon as users login and lets them get to know everything the application can do.
Unlike most product tours that are relatively static, Grammarly's product tour involves a mini-demo environment with hotspots and beacons. It also has a gamification component that awards users with badges as they progress through the product tour and learn the features. Additionally, onboarding starts with the user choosing their writing goals, which presents them with a more relevant version of the product tour that addresses their specific writing needs.
4. Ghostwriter.ai
A tool familiar to marketing content writers, Ghostwriter.ai helps generate and customize content for campaigns. With a comprehensive and complex set of features, this SaaS solution has a product tour that spans all of its capabilities, while customizing the onboarding process to the user's needs.
Ghostwriter.ai utilizes contextual tooltips and a progress bar to enable users to see where they are in the walkthrough. However, what makes Ghostwriter.ai's product tour stand out is how engaging and fun it is, with a quirky assistant aptly named "Casper" alongside silly GIFs, memes, concise copy, and creative visual design.
5. Airtable
A hybrid between a database and a spreadsheet, Airtable is a complex product that targets a diverse audience. To make their product tour more effective and engaging, Airtable employs a mix of tooltips, modals, and slideouts. It makes extensive use of GIF animations to highlight and explain key features as part of the tour.
The sequential click-through structure of the product tour ensures that users learn the complex system one step at a time.
6. Hubspot
Last but not least is the CRM and multichannel publishing platform Hubspot. With an extensive list of marketing, sales, and social media management features, this SaaS platform requires a comprehensive product tour. To keep users engaged, the product tour starts with asking the user to choose their role (sales, marketing, etc.) so that they see the features and UI components most relevant to their job.
What makes the HubSpot product tour effective in boosting usage is its simple design and the step-by-step walkthrough of the features most relevant to every user segment.
Why You Need More Than a Basic Product Tour
Product tours are a valuable part of onboarding and user engagement strategies. They introduce users to core features and help them get started, but their capabilities stop there. Basic product tours alone aren't enough to drive sustained product usage, boost conversions, or provide the in-depth data needed to understand user behavior throughout the onboarding process.
To truly elevate user engagement and increase conversions—especially during a trial phase—you need more than just a guided walkthrough. This is where a demo operations platform like Demostack comes in.
Unlike traditional product tours, a demo operations platform offers an interactive, immersive experience that goes beyond simple feature highlights. With customizable demo environments, sandboxes, overlays, and real-time technical features, users can experience a genuine proof of concept within the product itself.
These advanced capabilities allow potential users to engage with your product as if it were already part of their workflow, giving them a firsthand understanding of its value. This level of interaction helps build trust, accelerates the decision-making process, and significantly increases the likelihood of conversion.
Beyond Product Tours: Interactive Product Demonstrations with Demostack
Product tours that boost usage are usually streamlined, user-centric, and work best when tailored for a specific audience segment. While relatively cheap to produce for existing products, product tours offer limited capabilities, and rarely live up to user expectations when it comes to their onboarding experience.
While a product tour is certainly better than potentially overwhelming users with a complex dashboard and plethora of features, it doesn't deliver the UX functionality of a comprehensive demo operations platform built for sales teams.
Demostack goes beyond standard product tours by enabling the creation of interactive, customizable walkthroughs that immerse users in a real-world exploration of your product. With Demostack, teams can build shareable, fully interactive demos that replicate their application’s environment. This approach not only highlights key features in a dynamic and engaging way but also provides users with hands-on experience that drives deeper understanding and connection with the product.
The platform's advanced capabilities allow for tailored experiences that cater to different user needs, enhancing engagement and guiding users through meaningful interactions. Additionally, Demostack offers analytics that track user behavior, helping teams refine their onboarding strategies and improve user retention.
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