Start-Up Watch COD: Now it’s easy and affordable to Ask Your Target Market most anything!

I love actionable market research as a means of powering marketing. But the cost can be prohibitive in some circumstances, and for many smaller and boutique brands. A company called Ask Your Target Market (on the web at aytm.com) hopes to bring the value of quantitative market research to more brands and situations by making it vastly more affordable.

“Powered” by a panel of more than 2 million possible respondents, AYTM enables people to define a pool of respondents and field quantitative research for a very low cost per respondent. The minimum cost for respondents is indeed quite minimal – 95 cents per – though with some specs like gender, family situation and region, the costs get a scosh higher. But in experimenting with their audience definition tools I found that more specific targets (reflective of what a large brand might want) could be had in the $5-$10 per respondent range. Still a bargain at twice the price. Thrice even.

Specs you can use to target your audience include:

Age – By age ranges or with a minimum or maximum
Employment status – Full time, part time, retired, student, or not working
Ethnicity – The usual breaks here
Household income – Options to select a range or a maximum/minimum only
Education – The usual breaks
Geographical location – Regions, states
Gender – No surprises here
Relationship status – Single, married, divorced, widowed
Additionally, they have people categorized by 168 behaviors and psychographics, like “have a Facebook account.”

One of the interesting things they offer is an estimated completed by date. Or rather time, because the turnaround of a project from launch is ridiculously short. Getting a survey of about 100 Moms, for example, would have taken about 2 hours when I did my demo.

Not two months

Not two weeks

Not even two days

Two miracuolously short hours.

Think about THAT the next time you want to run some spec creative by consumers for a pitch.

Anyway. To use the service, you visit the site, input your respondent specs, define a number of completes, and upload the content (like video or documents) that you want people to respond to. You can field a standard questionnaire or take advantage of skip logic to go deeper into issues and segments without overwhelming people with question counts.

Here’s their short and sweet demo vid:



I don't think this platform can entirely replace custom research. But so many of the projects we want to field, at least in my experience, could be more than met with this sort of standardized offering. At a cost that is smaller than that available from a custom research provider by a factor of ten or more.

But even more important than the potential savings is the opportunity to do real research in more instances and situations. We don’t need to fly blind anymore. And THAT is most definitely a good thing, especially as society and lifestyles get more and more complicated.

Good stuff you should definitely check out.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.