.svg){kind=logo}
Do you have, or are you looking to implement a Product Tour Marketing Strategy? Here are five mistakes to avoid.
#1 - Hiding your tours
This one might seem obvious but we see mistakes here all the time.
If you are going to lead with your product … then lead with your product!
Product Tours are kinda like billboards for your product except they’re much more interactive and come with a lot more data.
Billboards on a busy interstate cost more than those on a rural country road for a reason.
Translating to software, that means not burying those tours on website pages that receive minimal traffic.
The best place for your tours can be a standalone tour page, a primary CTA with a lightbox, or even tours throughout the site to help describe different products, solutions, features, integrations, etc.
Here’s a great example of a tour implementation right on the homepage!
#2 - Misleading CTAs
Even after putting it in a great place, you should ensure your CTAs clearly indicate the experience a visitor is about to have.
The best CTAs for a product tour are:
- "Take a Tour"
- "Start the Tour"
- "Take an Interactive Tour"
- "Launch Interactive Tour"
Misleading CTAs to avoid:
- “Demo the Product”
- “See the Product”
- “See how it works”
- “Take a look”
Sendoso uses “Launch Interactive Tour” on their Platform page. Clear and direct ✅
#3 - Gating your tours
This one may seem obvious … but we still see a lot of gated tours out there.
If you are planning to gate your tour as a lead gen tactic, we’d recommend sticking with a much lighter weight solution for showing the product (like a demo recording).
It’s not going to be worth the time to invest in a product tour platform if you still intend to pepper those leads.
The biggest reason we see companies still gating those tours? Lack of ability to capture engagement and intent data without a form fill. But if you gate them, is the tour really doing the work, or is it the gate plus your sales team?
That’s why Tourial has robust integrations with Hubspot and Marketo. They enable you to capture all that rich engagement and intent data without requiring a form fill first.
Let your buyers raise their hands to talk with you first!
#4 - The Megatour
Your product has a lot of value to offer. The tricky part is knowing how to communicate all of that value to your buyers.
We see a lot of companies that build super long tours with 30+ steps and multiple branching paths.
The problem is these tours take longer to design, build, and keep updated.
And, we don’t see them perform as well because of the click fatigue a visitor feels just trying to get through it.
By forcing everything into one experience, you’re taking some of the choice away from your buyers to decide what parts of your product they’d like to explore.
What if that one key feature in the megatour gets missed?
What if there’s a more subtle value point that a buyer would benefit from knowing if it was presented as a standalone tour?
We’ve found that breaking your tours down into individual value points makes them more digestible and enables the buyer to pick and choose what they want to explore.
DataRobot does a terrific job of showing this type of self-serve experience on a tour page.
#5 - Lack of attribution
Last but not least, don’t set up your tours without a plan to understand if they’re working.
This isn’t as simple as putting it on your website and seeing how many people complete the tour.
We typically see some of our best performing tours have a ~60-70% completion rate (no joke).
What do we mean by “best performing”?
The company is set up to attribute both direct conversions and influenced pipeline.
To start, we’d recommend having CTAs present throughout your tour. This enables your prospects to raise their hand whenever they’re ready to talk to your team or sign up.
And then you’ll want to work with a vendor that has robust integrations with your marketing automation platform to determine influenced pipeline for those that engaged with your tour but did not directly submit their information.
For example, BoostUp was able to determine 70% of their pipeline interacted with a tour before submitting a form!
Here’s a link to their Tours page.
Setting up product tours can have a powerful impact on your website and conversions. But the strategy and vendor you partner with will have a tremendous impact on the success and especially the ability to see that success with data.
