Product Feedback: How to Use Visuals and Demos to Gain Customer Insights

When creating a product or service, it can be easy to think you have made something that no one has ever thought of, and it’s going to revolutionize the world. But without bringing it to the people and businesses that could potentially use it to gather their opinions, you won’t know for sure.Market research can certainly help in the initial planning stages of your idea, but there comes a time when you need feedback on your products or services to gain real insights.This can highlight to you where improvements need to be made or what the universal benefits are that can be a part of your marketing campaign.Visualization and demonstrations become an invaluable part of your process to help you gain valuable customer insights to further develop and improve your product.

Product demonstrations

Perhaps the best way to gain useful customer insights and impressions is to demonstrate your product or service using a live streaming solution to them.

They can also help support sales, with 69% of consumers believing a product demo best helps them when making a purchase decision.There are two common ways to achieve this:

• Demo periods

• Direct demonstrations

Demo periods allow your customers to take your product away for a certain period and try it for themselves to see how it enriches their lives or for B2B, how it can improve their systems and processes.For online demonstrations it's now easier with the advance and accessibility of AI. An AI voice generation tool can have your written demonstration easily voiced in a host of different accents and languages. Your product will be demonstrated worldwide from the comfort of your customers’ homes.Direct demonstrations, on the other hand, allow you to present your product or service to a customer, showcasing its features and putting it through its paces in a favorable and promotional way.

How to gather customer feedback from a demonstration

gather user feedback

With one of the goals of product demonstrations to gather customer feedback about their experience, it’s important to have some idea of how you plan to go about it.Here is your chance to speak with customers one-to-one, to ask them about what they like and dislike about your products and whether there are any improvements to be made.Good product demonstration feedback procedure:Ask open-ended questions: yes/no answers don’t allow for any expansion and won’t be that informative.Time your questions well: asking what someone thinks of your product too early might not result in the best response outside of an initial impression. Giving customers time to form their thoughts results in a better quality answer.Listen to customer responses: you may be trying to keep things conversational but ensure that you listen to customer feedback and give them time to articulate what they feel, rushing an answer won’t improve the feedback you need.Using one or both of these product demonstration methods can help you to gain valuable customer insights to continually improve the products and services you provide, which in turn can lead to a stronger brand identity. Furthermore, a successful demonstration of your product naturally leads to stronger sales as people have seen it in action and are more confident about committing to it.

Visual campaigns

If you aren’t able to let people get their hands on your product before they try it, the next best alternative is to create a visual representation and demo. While the visuals are less interactive than they would be in a proper demonstration, we can still use visualization effectively to gain those customer insights.Producing product images and videos and disseminating them across social media or your website proves highly effective in spotlighting the functionality of your product to a wider audience. What's more, the interactive capabilities of social media platforms facilitate the acquisition of valuable customer insights immediately upon uploading a video or image, which can be seamlessly enhanced using a proficient video editor or image maker software."However, we must give just as much care and attention to how our products and services look in a demonstration as we would when rolling out a marketing campaign. To elevate brand presence we must remember that products only register as high quality if they come across in the customer's first impression.

User-generated content

reviews

We can also rely on customers to provide user-generated feedback on our products which is further strengthened when encouraged to share images or videos of their experiences, creating trustworthy visual content that others can rely upon.Through social media campaigns, contests, or other incentives we can look to increase engagement and build a community around a product and allow it to be praised by the people who use it.Encouraging videos and photos in your testimonials enriches the experience for those who read and view them. This helps to build trust with potential customers by showing how others have benefitted from and used your product with great satisfaction.When we don’t necessarily have much to base a purchasing decision on, other reviews and testimonials are great guidance.Research shows that almost two-thirds of people making online purchases read between 1 and 6 reviews before deciding to purchase.

Product updates

ethical choices

Visual content can be used to showcase product updates and new features. We can achieve this through product release videos, demonstration videos or animations, and other visual aids such as infographics and 3D rendering to highlight the benefits of the new product features.This visual aid can act as the catalyst for engagement and conversation when creating a product update event through social media, PR campaigns, or even blog posts. Rather than focusing on demonstrations, you can offer more information about your product update, such as highlighting ethical values on social media posts or your brand’s unique selling points. With visual campaigns spread across social platforms, you are able to select a targeted audience that is more likely to be interested in the developments and have something to say or questions to ask.

Improving user experience

One of the easiest ways to encourage feedback using visuals is a pop-up survey on your website. It can be a quick survey with just a few questions that can greatly increase participation rates or you may even wish to incentivize it with discounts for completion or vouchers as a reward.This is convenient as you are catching customers as they visit your website, even if you aren’t heavily focused on e-commerce.