If you’re marketing software, you naturally want to show off your feature-packed and easy-to-use user interface. Determining why users should be interested in your solution is key to deciding what to show them. But keep in mind that you’re marketing, not demo-ing. Here are a few different approaches to conveying business benefits while making your software look good. Here are a few ideas for showing a user interface in your explainer video.
Features and benefits without screens
User interfaces are designed to perform tasks and provide visibility into collected data. So the decision on what to show and how to show it comes down to which tasks and data sets to show off.
This is from a video about banking software, but the interface is not important to the message, which is about reaching millennials whose “relationships” with banks are different from those of earlier generations.
If the process is routine — like checking a bank balance on a mobile device — there is probably no reason to show it at all. The point you want to make is that this ought to be routine, and it is. So, in this presentation for a company that makes software that financial institutions re-sell to their customers, the emphasis is on the target market, millennials, not the software interface.
In this abstract view of satellite management software, we see a software feature, the ability to switch to a new equipment chain. More important, we understand the revenue impact of using the feature.
Similarly, if the key product benefit is insight into the business, it may be preferable to bring out that insight in the context of a simplified UI. In this video, the software makes lots of useful details available to the operator, but the unique business value is in the ability to display network operations in terms of business impact. That comes across more clearly in a simplified illustration based on the real user interface.
Business results tied to screens
On the other hand, if the target audience for the video is potential hands-on users of the software, it’s important to show what the user actually sees. But this isn’t a tutorial. There’s no need to follow the exact sequence of operations through a lot of clicks, drags, and drops. You’re still addressing buyers looking for business results
