Mastering Product Demo Videos: The Ultimate Guide

In a recent study, 84% of consumers said they’d been convinced to make a purchase based on a brand’s video — and over three-quarters of respondents said they’d made the decision to download a mobile app or product after specifically watching a product demo video.* This highlights the huge potential of product demo videos to drive conversions and growth for your business.

Product demo videos are a game-changer for marketing and sales teams looking to bring prospects to an ‘aha’ moment where they understand the true value of the product. And the good news is, product demos can be made even more interactive through engagement-focused live webinars and on-demand webinar replays.

But many teams don’t feel confident creating product demo video content because of limited resources, technical hurdles, and difficulties crafting a clear, persuasive message. 

That’s why we’ve created this ultimate guide. We'll walk you through all the essential steps to master the art of product demo videos and product demo webinars. From defining your target audience and crafting an engaging script to leveraging interactive elements and analyzing performance, you'll learn proven strategies to create demo videos and events that educate, inspire, and convert.

* Wyzowl, 2023

Killer Product Demo Videos: The Essential Ingredients

Before we dive into the step-by-step process, let's quickly recap the basics of product demo videos and why they're so effective. 

A product demo is a short, focused video that showcases your product's key features, benefits, and use cases. It can take the form of a pre-recorded video, a live webinar presentation, or an on-demand webinar replay. 

The goal of product demos is to educate potential customers, highlight your product's value, and address your audience’s concerns. Ultimately, you want to motivate your prospects to take the next step, whether that's signing up for a free trial, requesting more information, or making a purchase.

To create a killer product demo video that achieves these goals, you need to include several essential ingredients:

• ‍Clear value proposition — Your video should communicate what your product is, what it does, and, most importantly, why it matters to your target audience. Focus on the key benefits and unique selling points that set your product apart.‍
• Engaging storytelling — In any demo presentation, you’ll want to avoid just listing features. Instead, weave a compelling narrative that shows your product in action and helps viewers envision exactly how it can solve their problems or improve their lives. Use relatable examples, case studies, and real-world scenarios to make your video more engaging and persuasive.‍
• Great visuals and audio — Whether you’re creating a pre-recorded video or running a live webinar, high-quality visuals and clear audio are essential. In your presentation or video clip, use a combination of product screenshots, screen recordings, animations, and live-action footage to showcase your product in the best light. Invest in good lighting, sound equipment, and editing or webinar software to ensure your video looks and sounds top-notch.‍
• Focused content & script — Keep your product demo focused, concise, and on-message. Spend time developing a well-structured, compelling script that guides viewers through your key features and benefits in a logical, easy-to-follow way without going off-track or losing their attention. Use simple, jargon-free language: look to connect with your audience at their level.‍
• Call to action —  Always include a clear, compelling call to action (CTA) that guides viewers on the next steps. Whether it's encouraging them to sign up for a free trial, book a demo, or visit your website for more information, make sure your CTA is prominent, specific, and easy to follow. If you’re running product demo webinars, you’ll need to make sure your webinar tool includes eye-catching featured actions that make it easy for participants to take the next step.‍
• Interactivity and dialogue — The best product demos engage the audience and drive two-way conversations. Look for opportunities to involve your viewers, whether through Q&A sessions, live chat, polls, or hands-on product demonstrations. For live product demo webinars or virtual events, make the most of real-time questions, attendee spotlights, polls or surveys, and live downloads. For on-demand product webinar replays, you can use tools like Demio to incorporate interactive elements like clickable hotspots, integrated polls/quizzes, and scheduled downloads—and even an AI-powered chat. 

By focusing on these essential ingredients, you'll be well on your way to creating product demo videos that compel and convert your target audience. In the next section, we'll walk you through detailed steps you can follow to bring your demo video to life.

‍👀 Looking for inspiration? Take a look at our case study to learn how Nutshell’s product-focused webinar got a 60% conversion rate! 

10 Steps for a Captivating Product Demo Video

Creating an effective product demo video requires careful planning, execution, and optimization. Customize our proven 12-step process to guide you from start to finish while meeting your unique business and customer needs. 

Step 1. Know Your Audience

The first and most crucial step is to clearly define and understand your target audience. Who are you creating this demo for? What are their pain points, challenges, and goals? What kind of content, language, and channels do they respond to?

Draw on your existing buyer persona, making sure that you know your ideal customer:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.)
• Job titles and industries
• Challenges and pain points
• Goals and aspirations
• Preferred content formats and channels

It’s often useful to have cross-functional discussions at this stage of planning, bringing together product, marketing, and customer-facing teams focused on customer success and support. 

The more perspectives you have on your target viewers, the more effectively you can craft your product demo messaging, visuals, and examples.

Step 2. Set Clear Goals

Before you start filming your demo video or promoting your demo webinar, it's important to define your key objectives and success metrics. 

Ask yourself what your priorities are and what a great outcome looks like. Are you focused on middle-of-the-funnel brand awareness and reach? Generating new leads and free trial signups? Directly driving sales and revenue? Improving onboarding and adoption for new users (or free trial users)? 

Once you've identified your primary goals, determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you'll use to track progress. For standalone videos, these might include views, engagement rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, or revenue generated. For webinar video content, you may want to track registration and attendance rates, participant engagement levels, time spent focused, and conversion clicks.

Setting clear goals upfront will help you create a more focused, effective product demo and help you measure — and demonstrate — your ROI. 

It's also wise to set project goals and milestones to keep your product demo creation process on track. 

In collaboration with all stakeholders involved, build out a timeline with key dates for scripting, storyboarding, filming, and editing your content, as well as promoting and launching your video or webinar.

Step 3. Write a Persuasive Script

With your audience and goals defined, it's time to start crafting your script — the foundation of any great video or webinar. It should be clear, concise, and compelling, guiding viewers through your product's key features and benefits with lively storytelling that helps them visualize exactly how your product could solve their pains.

Here are some tips on how to write a persuasive product demo script:

• Start with a strong hook that grabs viewers' attention and makes them want to keep watching. This could be a thought-provoking question, a surprising statistic, or a relatable scenario that highlights the problem your product solves.
• Incorporate social proof, such as customer testimonials, case studies, or notable milestones to build trust and credibility.
• Use simple, conversational language that resonates with your target audience. Avoid jargon, buzzwords, or overly technical terms that might confuse or alienate viewers.
• Anticipate and address common questions, concerns, or objections your viewers might have. This could include things like pricing, integrations, ease of use, security, or convincing their leadership team of the ROI.
• Focus on showing, not just telling. Whenever possible, illustrate key points with relevant visuals, animations, or demo footage rather than relying solely on narration.

Step 4. Emphasize Key Features & Benefits

As you're planning your video or webinar script and visuals, stay tightly focused on the key features and benefits that matter most to your target audience. Remember, your viewers don't care about a laundry list of features — they care about how it can solve their specific problems, make their lives easier, and help them achieve their targets.

Decide on the top 3-5 features or benefits that are most important to your customers' personas and make those the centerpiece of your demo video. Use relevant examples, case studies, and scenarios throughout to show these features in action and illustrate the tangible results they deliver.

For example, if you're demoing a CRM software, instead of rattling off a list of capabilities and integrations, focus on exactly how it helps sales teams close more deals faster. Get granular on the specific features and uses that streamline the sales process and save the end user time and energy, while boosting revenue for the company.

As you're highlighting key features, don't forget to mention any particularly notable integrations or partnerships that might be important to your viewers. For instance, if your product integrates with popular tools your prospects use every day like Salesforce, Google Analytics, or Shopify, call that out and explain exactly how it could fit in with their current tech stack and day-to-day workflow. 

Again, avoid information overload — be selective with key examples of features and integrations, and guide users to further resources (or trials) to find out more. 

Step 5. Ensure Brand Alignment

Your product demo video is an extension of your brand, and it should look, sound, and feel consistent with your other marketing materials and channels. 

This means using your brand colors, logos, fonts, and imagery throughout the process, as well as adhering to your brand voice and messaging standards in all of your promotions. 

For example, if you’re running a product demo webinar, you’ll want to make sure you personalize your registration page, reminder emails, and follow-up communications. Make sure you choose a webinar platform with strong customization options so you can keep your brand identity top of mind.

You may want to create a style guide or template for your demo video content and presentations to ensure consistency. This could include guidelines for slide formatting and logos, animations, product screenshots or screen recordings, background music or sound effects, and closed captioning or subtitle formatting. 

By prioritizing brand alignment, you'll create a more cohesive, professional, and recognizable demo.

Step 6. Choose the Right Format

Deciding on the right format will depend on your specific product, audience, goals, and resources. 

Here are a few popular options:

• ‍Explainer Video: A short, high-level overview video that explains what your product is, what it does, and why it matters. Explainer videos are often animated and geared toward top-of-funnel prospects who are just learning about your product. You generally embed them on your website and social media channels. You can also include explainer videos within your content for introductory product webinars.
• ‍Walkthrough Video: A more in-depth video that guides viewers through your product's key features, interface, and workflows, using a combination of screen recordings, live footage, and narration to showcase the product in action. Even if you’re doing a live product webinar, you may want to include a pre-recorded product walkthrough to avoid any technical hitches. ‍
• Tutorial Video: A step-by-step product demo video that teaches viewers how to use a specific feature or complete a particular task within your product. Tutorial videos are often geared towards new or trial users who are learning the ropes — or promoting adoption of new product features. ‍
• Live or On-Demand Webinar: A live or pre-recorded virtual event that allows you to showcase your product and interact with viewers in real time. Webinar one-to-many product demos and sales demos are great for engaging prospects, understanding your audience better, answering questions, and building relationships.‍
• Case Study or Testimonial Video: A video that showcases a real customer's experience and results with your product. Case study videos often include interviews, product footage, and data/metrics to illustrate the concrete benefits of using your product. These can be posted on your channels as standalone content or you can embed them into webinars and calls as strong social proof. 

You can also mix and match these formats to create a more comprehensive, full-funnel demo video strategy. For example, you might create a high-level explainer video for your website homepage, a more detailed walkthrough video for your product page, and an engaging, multi-part demo video — with time for Q&A — for your webinars. 

Remember that different formats also have different ideal lengths. While there's no hard and fast rule, most effective product explainers and walkthrough videos are between 2–5 minutes long. 

For product demo webinars, you can run longer as the varied format holds viewers’ attention better and lets you do a deep dive. 20–60 minutes is a good rule of thumb here, depending on your product complexity and customer preferences.

‍👀 Check out our sales demo best practices for more tips and tricks.

Step 7. Make It Engaging

No matter how great your product is, if your product demo is dull, confusing, or hard to follow, viewers will tune out quickly.

Here are some tips for making your demo video more engaging:

Start with a bang — Grab viewers' attention right off the bat with a compelling hook, question, or statistic that piques their interest and makes them want to keep watching.

Use humor and personality — Inject some humor, personality, and storytelling into your script and delivery to make your video more relatable and memorable. 

Vary your visuals — Use a mix of different visual elements - like live footage, screen recordings, animations, and slides - to keep your video visually interesting and engaging. Avoid long stretches of static shots or talking heads.

Use audio elements strategically — Background music and sound effects can help set the tone, evoke emotions, and make your video more engaging. But you should use them sparingly, making sure they don’t feel overwhelming or distract from your main message.

Get interactive — One of the most effective ways of engaging viewers is by including interactive elements like quizzes, polls, handouts, or featured actions to make your video. Platforms like Demio make it easy to incorporate engagement and audience participation features into both live and pre-recorded, on-demand webinar demos.

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For live product webinars, Demio lets you take engagement to the next level by prepping your event room in advance with interactive elements like polls, handouts, and featured actions. That means you get all the engagement features without worrying about juggling all the tech in real time. 

For on-demand product demo webinars, you can schedule interactive elements to launch at specific times during the replay. That means those watching the recording can still participate in polls and surveys, download goodies, and participate in interactive games or challenges.

Step 8. Add Strong Calls-to-Action

Your product demo video should include a clear, compelling call-to-action (CTA) that guides viewers toward exactly what you want them to do next. Your CTA should be specific, actionable, and tied directly to your product demo goals.

Ideas for demo videos CTAs include:

• Sign up for a free trial
• Request a personalized demo
• Schedule a consultation
• Download a resource (e.g. e-book, white paper, case study)
• Visit a specific page on your website

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Make sure your CTA is prominently displayed, visually appealing, and easy to follow. 

Use clear, direct language and action-oriented phrasing like "Start your free trial now" or "Schedule your demo today."

If you're using Demio to run your webinar demos, you can add clickable CTAs right within the event room using the Featured Actions tool. This allows you to drive viewers to take specific actions — like downloading a resource or signing up for a trial — without ever leaving the webinar experience.

Depending on your product demo format and style, you can consider including a few different CTAs throughout to give viewers several opportunities to engage and convert. For example, in a standalone video demo, you might include a verbal CTA in your intro and conclusion and a couple of clickable CTAs sprinkled throughout the recording. For a webinar demo, you might include CTAs to download branded resources or sign up for a free trial throughout, with a more prominent free trial/schedule a call CTA at the end.

Just be sure not to overwhelm viewers with too many different CTAs or ask them to take too big of a leap too soon. Your CTAs should feel natural, relevant, and low-pressure, guiding viewers to take the next logical step based on where they are in their buyer's journey.

Step 9. Edit and Polish

Once you've filmed all your footage and gathered your visual assets, it's time to edit your video or polish up your webinar demo presentation.

For standalone videos, you’ll want to use tools like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie. For webinar presentations, choose software like Demio that lets you pre-record — or practice — presentations within the tool itself.

Before you start editing your content, organize your footage and visual assets into folders or bins based on type (e.g. screen recordings, live footage, animations) or scene. This will make it easier to find what you need and keep your project organized.

Then create a rough cut of your video or presentation, following your script or storyboard as a guide. Focus on getting the basic structure and flow of your video down first, without worrying too much about perfecting every transition or effect.

Once you have a rough cut, go through and trim any unnecessary footage, long pauses, or filler. Tighten up your pacing and aim for a smooth, logical flow from one scene or talking point to the next.

Use transitions, animations, and other effects to smooth out cuts, emphasize key points, and add visual interest to your video. Just be sure to use these elements sparingly and strategically, so they don't distract from your main message.

Incorporate any graphics, logos, or branding elements into your video. This might include lower thirds (name and title graphics), intro/outro slides, or watermarks.

Use color correction, grading tools, and audio enhancements like noise reduction to ensure your footage looks and sounds consistent and professional. You should also consider adding captions or subtitles to make your demo more accessible.

10. Get Feedback and Analytics

Getting feedback to refine your product demo videos and webinars is key to continually improving your results.

Before you launch your demo video or run your webinar, do a trial run to get feedback from a small group of colleagues or sample customers.

Ask for their honest input on things like:

Clarity and comprehension — Is the messaging clear and easy to understand? Are there any points of confusion or areas that need more explanation?

Engagement and interest — Is the demo engaging and interesting? Does it hold their attention throughout? Did they have opportunities to feel like participants, not just passive viewers? 

Persuasiveness and impact — Does the demo effectively showcase the most important value and benefits of your product? Would it motivate them to take action?

Use this input to make any necessary revisions or improvements before launching your demo to a wider audience.

Once your demo is live, track and analyze key performance metrics to gauge its effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. You’ll want a good sense of view count and completion rate, CTA click-through rate, viewer ratings or comments, and free trial signups. 

For product demo webinars, look for platforms like Demio that offer built-in analytics and reporting features. You’ll be able to track registration and attendance rates; engagement indicators like poll responses, handout downloads, and chat activity; focus time and dropoffs; and conversions and click-through rates. You’ll also be able to segment users and integrate the results into your CRM for lead scoring and personalized follow up. 

Elevate Your Product Demo Game

Creating effective product demo videos and webinars is both an art and a science. It requires a deep understanding of your target audience, a clear and compelling message, and a strategic approach to production, promotion, and analysis.

By following the steps and best practices outlined in this guide, you'll be well-equipped to create demo videos and webinars that educate, engage, and convert your audience. Take a look at our product demo checklist to keep things organized and make sure you’re all set.

Remember, your product demo webinar is a unique opportunity to make a powerful impression, showcase your unique value proposition, and motivate your audience to take the next step in their journey with your brand.

By leveraging the power of Demio, you can create interactive, immersive product demo webinar experiences. Whether you're running a live demo webinar, an automated on-demand session, or sending out a webinar replay, Demio gives you the tools and insights you need to succeed, from start to finish.