How To Drive Traffic With Interactive Content

"How does Storylane use Storylane?" I get asked this all the time. Fair question. So here's our actual playbook (so far): 1/ Website: Interactive demos on our homepage, product pages, and landing pages. Adding interactive demos to enterprise pages soon (should've done that way sooner). 2/ Champion enablement: GOLD. Custom interactive demos for champions at target accounts. Instead of hoping they explain your product right, you control the narrative. They use these interactive demos to sell internally. We've closed deals way faster. 3/ Conference booths: Screen with interactive demos on autopilot. Simple but works every time. 4/ Demo QR codes at events: On slides or booth backdrop. Attendees scan, experience interactive demos on phones and take your product back home with them. Perfect when booth is packed. 5/ Outbound: Stop telling, start showing. "Here's a 2-min interactive demo" beats feature pitches. Response rates? Night and day difference. 6/ LinkedIn: For announcing new features, add interactive demos links so viewers click through actual product, then book/signup. Or show it as native content on LinkedIn (video/GIF) by downloading your interactive demos. 7/ Demo-led SEO (DLS): Targeted ICP's search queries with tutorial pages with no text and only interactive demos (like "how to merge a custom field in Salesforce"). Grew from 20K to 220K monthly visits in <6 months. Google is loving DLS content. 8/ BOFU blogs: For "Best X Alternatives" posts, embed interactive demos of competitors' products. Visitors evaluate options on your page instead of bouncing to other sites. Game changer. 9/ Product launch campaigns: Hard to time product release date with marketing launch date. So instead create interactive demos from the staging environment of the feature while in development and use it for your launch. Use these interactive demos in webinars and give waitlist early access to the preview with a demo of the feature. It worked amazing for us. 10/ Feature announcements: One-line email + interactive demo link beats lengthy explanations of your feature every time. 11/ Win-back campaigns: Show churned customers what they're missing with interactive demos of new features since they left. Works better than any "we've improved" messaging. 12/ Product validation: Not sure if a feature is worth building? Create quick interactive demos using Figma screens and demo it to gauge prospects' excitement. Saved months of development. 13/ Support: Replace long help articles with interactive demos. People prefer seeing how to solve problems with interactive demos. 14/ Sales Enablement: Give sales team persona-specific and feature-specific interactive demos. Reuse these interactive demos as YouTube content too. 15/ Social - Feature announcements with embedded interactive demos get way more engagement than standard posts. Our demo playbook is continuing to expand, but this is what's working well right now. Hope this helps!

Respectfully, I've been doing this. This video from 13 years ago is proof of it. Here's the story... In 2010, I challenged the conventional music video formula with a simple question: "What if viewers could choose what happens next?" We shot "Attack of the Five Foot Hipster" in Brooklyn using DIY camera rigs made from PVC pipes and iPod Nanos (yes, those devices in the photos). No fancy equipment, just creative problem-solving. When we uploaded the standard version, the reception was brutal: • "Don't quit your day job" • "This is garbage"    One week later, we uploaded the EXACT SAME footage but added interactive elements—a choose-your-own-adventure interface letting viewers control the story. The transformation was immediate: • "This song is a hit!" • "When's the album dropping?" • Views increased 10X • People started BUYING the track they'd trashed days earlier    This wasn't just a cool experiment. YouTube had no interactive features back then, so we had to hack together a solution that made traditional content interactive. That's when I realized: We don't have a content problem. We have an engagement crisis. Passive content has a ceiling. Interactive content has a ladder. Soon after, Fortune 500 companies started calling: "How can we use this technology?" That experiment evolved (over years) into Adventr—now powering interactive experiences for major brands: • Personalized ancestry journeys for 23andMe • Choose-your-path storytelling for NBC • Gamified commercials for Paramount    The lesson wasn't about having fancy equipment (clearly, from our PVC pipe rigs). It was about reimagining the relationship between content and audience. Years before Netflix, HBO, and YouTube invested millions in interactive content, we were pioneering it with creativity and resourcefulness. I've been doing this for 10+ years, and I'm excited that the industry is finally catching up. -DH P.S. Check the comments if you want to see the video (keep in mind this was ~2012!)

We analyzed over 110,257 web sessions and 150 deals to measure the impact of interactive demos on conversion rates and time to convert. How we did it? We used Factors.ai to build anonymized funnels, mapping website sessions. Then, we compared the performance of prospects that engage with an interactive demo against the overall average from our dataset. The results: 24.35% website conversion rate (sign-up, form submission, etc.) from website visitors that engaged with an interactive demo. 3.05% average website conversion rate when there is no interactive demo. That’s nearly 8x greater... 8x! Big win... 🤯 So here are 3 takeaways: 💡Interactive content drives engagement & conversions. It’s stickier than static content. It resonates better and keeps visitors engaged longer. 💡Placement matters, so make interactive demos easy to find. Position prominently on high-intent pages. Don’t bury demos in the footer or behind too many clicks. 💡Don’t gate too early. Let the demo sell first. Instead of gating with a form upfront, let prospects explore first. A well-placed lead form inside the demo (after a few steps), leads to better conversions. #interactivedemos #websiteconversion #plg #conversionoptimization

Across all my clients, here are the 3 things that continue to work well: 1. Events—in-person and virtual 2. Zero gate content—across the entire buyer's journey 3. Email—short, prescriptive, with (1) CTA Why 'zero gate' content work: Gated content has its place, but nothing says “trust,” like offering value before asking for anything in return. You have to give before you can earn the get. This creates a frictionless, buyer-first experience that you can still measure a lot from. Here’s what’s working ⤵️ 🔥 TIP | Embedding interactive product tours on key pages. A client is moving away from SLG to PLG motion. As part of this transition, they needed to move away from CTAs like "Request a Demo"/"Speak to Sales". A high-level interactive interactive product tour replaced these CTAs ("Take a Tour") across both their homepage and free trial page, resulting in a lift in trial user conversions within the first week. Don't forget to socialize the data from these tours with your sales team—they can use it to craft a more custom POV with their prospects to determine key areas of interest. 🔥 TIP | Long-form blogs backlinking to gated reports. Another client invested in distribution rights to two industry research reports with third-party research firms. Due to vendor requirements, the reports needed to stay gated, so we needed to create visibility that would build credibility with the market. The blog not only backlinked to the two gated landing pages but several other resources on and off their website. Within a few weeks, they began organically ranking for key industry terms while providing a low-budget and low-resource channel to drive downloads for their reports. 🔥 TIP | Custom resource hubs. Not all outbound has to be cold. Here are (3) company and people signals we use to craft a 1:1 custom resource landing page for target accounts: 1. Last Quarter Earnings Call [Company] 2. New Technographic Implementation [Company] 3. Unique page visits within the last 30 days [People] In one landing page, we demonstrate how we're uniquely equipped to help them hit their goals based on their company news and how they're interacting with our brand. It is important not to set it and forget it. As you continue to dive deeper into the account, refine your POV and update it with new resources. More on why emails with (1) CTA work soon. There is a commonality across why all 3 work well—what's your take on why? __ p.s. Check previous posts on what's working for my clients with events.