Quick Market Research

Have you ever wished it were less complicated to launch a survey?  Oh, sure.  It’s easy to work with a web-based engine like SurveyMonkey and create something that gets you answers to the nagging question du jour.  But those tools really only take care of the easy part – administering the survey and showing the data in interesting ways.  If you’re a media buyer like the folks that work here, you know that once somebody on the marketing team gets it in their head that they’d like to do a “quick” survey, you’re going to be shopping for e-mail lists within a day or two, just to help fulfill it.

A company called Toluna, however, is making it easier to fulfill on surveys.  As I explain in this AdAge column, it took me only a couple minutes to design a survey and then deploy it.  When I finished my survey (which was about Hot Sauce and why people buy it, by the way), Toluna’s Quicksurveys asked me if I wanted to fulfill by using a list of my Facebook and Twitter friends (free) or get 50 respondents from its panel for a mere $39.  No social spammer myself, I decided to go with the paid option.  That was at around 5 PM.  By 7:30 AM the next day, the survey was fielded and I had 50 respondents providing data I could monkey with.

I really like the notion of how simple Toluna makes this.  You know how easily your survey can get the target number of respondents, and you know exactly how much that will cost up front.  This is a way better approach than buying e-mail lists and praying that enough people on the list are both a) qualified and b) interested in responding.

This makes quick confirmations or refutations of assumptions a cinch.  Quicksurveys can also play a role in doing last-minute disaster checks on ads, confirming a target audience or fulfilling on any other nagging marketing unknown you’d like to get a finer gauge on.  While it won’t take the place of expensive online research just yet, I think it makes deploying quick research efforts very easy.  Maybe it makes sense to show your new digital ads to a group of 100 or so a few days before it goes live, or test that tagline with a small group before the rest of the world sees it.  Given how quick and cost-effective Quicksurveys can be, I don’t see why not.