At Ask Your Target Market.com, you can create a marketing survey to test a product idea or screen a commercial. You can also select the demographics of the people you want to survey and get results right away. Surveys start at just $29.95 for three questions to 50 people.
Ask Your Target Market.com recruits survey respondents through another site, InstantCashSweepstakes.com, where users register by giving their demographic information, then answer survey questions to compete to win a $50 daily prize or $2 prizes every four hours. Users can also profit by referring new members through their blogs or Twitter pages.
The sweepstakes site claims to rank participants by their truthfulness, based on the consistency of their answers, and tries to weed out people so they don’t claim all sorts of things to qualify for as many surveys as possible. Still, we’ve got to suspect that the survey panel is skewed toward — well, people who are motivated by a shot at winning a $2 prize. You may not want to test out that new app for hedge fund managers with this crowd.
Ask Your Target Market.com’s survey building tools are very easy to use. A nice feature is that you can see the price of your survey going up as you refine your requirements or increase your audience size (up to 400). The site will tell you upfront if they can’t fill out your target group and offers a partial credit if they don’t get you all the data in 72 hours.
How useful is the data likely to be? Professional market surveyors scoff at the validity of results from a sample of 50 people and many even find 100 to be borderline. But if you’re looking for clues, not science, Ask Your Target Market.com may be worth the low price. And that’s from a survey of one person … me.
