A seismic shift is underway. Tourial isn’t just announcing a relaunch of our brand and product strategy, but declaring a new era in SaaS marketing.
We are now laser-focused on helping vendors in the crowded SaaS market win the war for pipeline by winning the battle at TOFU (Top of Funnel).
Why focus on TOFU?
Because the struggle to generate pipeline starts long before prospects commit to a deep exploration of your product. Today’s buyers are deluged by hundreds of thousands of SaaS options, ads, and SDR spam coming from dozens of lookalikes in any given software category. Many prospects feel skeptical, overwhelmed, and numb.
61% of marketers identify lead generation as their biggest challenge, and research shows that 96% of marketing site visitors aren't ready to take a high-intent action when visiting a website (Dashly). The need for engaging and concise content to capture initial interest is more critical than ever.
Over the past five years, established industries have experienced a 70-75% rise in CAC, while newer markets have seen increases of approximately 50%. (Paddle.com) This makes “profitable, efficient growth” a lofty goal for scale ups that still aspire to scale rapidly.
Something has to change if the best, most deserving SaaS companies are going to have a fair fight for market share without resorting to brute force, CAC-killing spend.
To help ensure that the best products stound out in what April Dunford has called “a vast sea of sameness,” we’re arming B2B Saas Marketers and Sales Development teams with a revolutionary content format: the micro tour. Before we talk micro tours, it’s worth stepping back to understand the journey led Tourial to this moment.
Lessons learned
For five years, Tourial was immersed in the interactive demo space. Interactive demos are self guided experiences that let visitors click through product screens to get a preview of a set of features or workflows. Tourial’s journey in this category has yielded invaluable lessons.
My colleague and Tourial’s co-founder Jason Graub recognized that traditional approaches to “demo automation,” including Tourial’s own, had been leading good marketers toward less than best-practices.
While interactive demos made a lot of sense at the bottom of the marketing funnel when prospects were already engaged (think: including HTML-replicas of product sandboxes), they were too often black holes for buyers to get lost in when still on the fence about whether or not to take the time to explore a vendor’s offering at any depth.
The problem with click-heavy and screen-heavy interactive demos at TOFU boils down to a simple first principle of conversion: When you encourage users to click everywhere, you lead them nowhere. To make matters worse, interactive demos too often stray from timeless marketing axioms, like the fact that the best communication method ever invented is storytelling. Not feature-dumping.
For Jason, it was time to read the writing on the wall: If Tourial cared about solving the most pressing problems in orbit of our platform, it was time to turn our attention to optimizing TOFU content. I joined Tourial as CPO to build upon and evolve Tourial’s platform to take aim at the TOFU content crisis. And that’s where the micro tour comes in.
Enter micro tours: Interactive+short+stories
The new micro tour format is designed to hold the limited attention of busy prospects early in their buyer journey. The micro tour’s design takes three perspectives into account:
Context, Content, and Container.
Context: As noted above, we understand that the modern buyer is bombarded with options, that attention spans are shrinking, and mobile and social media reign supreme.
Content: Micro tours draw inspiration from the good old explainer video, and from the interactive demo concept that Tourial helped invent:
- While difficult and expensive to produce, effective explainer videos make good use engaging multi-media and storytelling to highlight a product's value and differentiation at the top of the funnel.
- Interactive demos enable customers to verify claims about a product by experiencing product features and workflow first-hand in a simulated experience. The trick is to not drown users in clicks and open ended rabbit holes, and to stick the landing on the product marketing team’s positioning points. This is where the explainer video’s storytelling element comes in handy.
Container: The micro tour lives within a self-contained digital experience inspired by marketing "microsites." This ensures a seamless, immersive journey without the need to navigate away to external sites:
- Each tour features a structured storyboard, screen-by-screen user interaction tracking, and powerful analytics to fuel sales and remarketing efforts.
- Augmented by "micro tour language" (MTL), our rich metadata protocol, micro tours empower third-party applications and AI agents to connect buyers with relevant tours in real-time.
Fueled by visionary customers, and an energetic response
When my R&D team rolled up our sleeves to retool Tourial’s platform, we took early inspiration from customers who “hacked” Tourial to create “storiented” tours, rather than product-heavy feature dumps. As a product manager, life is always easier when you can trace the steps of smart customers who are trying to accomplish something, even and especially when they are resorting to work-arounds.
As Tourial began immersing more of our customers into some exciting new tools like our AI Tour Planner and Storyboard generator, we were heartened by the overwhelmingly positive response from revenue marketers, sales development leaders, and PMMs. Winmo called our new release a “mic drop moment,” solving problems they didn’t know they had. Their team added that “Feeding Tourial things we already created [to be repurposed as micro tours]... cuts out 50% of the headache.” BoostUp shared that our AI planning wizard would help the team avert several meetings and many hours of planning. Orion is excited to unlock micro tour building at scale by using our story generation functionality to help builders stay grounded in the company’s official positioning, and in good storytelling hygiene.
So with the support of our amazing customers, the micro tour movement is in full effect.
To feel the vibes and grok the advantages that micro tours can unlock for your team, check out our customer tour gallery, check out tours of our microtour platform, or reach out to us.
