Choosing a Launch Market With Instagram, Search and Local Business Data
A scorecard method for picking your first country: measure demand, competition and feasibility with public data before spending a euro on ads.
“Which country should we launch in?” is usually answered by anecdote — a cousin in Berlin, good English, a fair at which someone once bought well. It can be answered with data instead, most of it public and free. This is the scorecard we use.
The three data families
1. Demand — search data. Search volume for your category’s precise vocabulary, per country, from any keyword tool. Jewelry is a precision category, so precise queries (“gold creolen 585”, “septum clicker 8mm”) are the demand signal that matters — generic volume (“earrings”) mostly measures population size. What you want: healthy specific-query volume relative to market size.
2. Competition — Instagram and marketplace supply. Count who already serves that demand: active local brand accounts in your price tier (our census work shows roughly half of visible accounts are commercially dead — filter by recent activity, not existence), and marketplace listing depth in the category. You are mapping the gap between demand and living supply.
3. Feasibility — the operational layer. Language you can genuinely operate customer service in, payment culture (invoice-loving Germany is not card-native UK), returns logistics from your location, and legal overhead (hallmarking rules, consumer law). A market that scores brilliantly on demand and fails feasibility is a later market, not a first one.
The scorecard
Score each candidate 1–5 per criterion, weighted for a first launch:
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Specific search demand | 30% |
| Living competition density (inverse) | 25% |
| Price-tier fit | 15% |
| Feasibility: language & service | 15% |
| Feasibility: logistics & returns | 15% |
The weights encode a launch philosophy: for market number one, winnable and operable beats biggest. A mid-size market you can serve in its own language, ship to cheaply, and stand out in beats a giant market where you are the thousandth indistinguishable shop.
How to run it
Two evenings of work: pick 3–5 candidate countries, fill the table with real numbers (volumes, active-account counts, listing counts, shipping quotes), and force a ranking. The discipline is refusing to override the table with the anecdote that started the question. Then the winner gets the full treatment — one channel first, sized to that market’s actual demand shape.
Sensitivity-check the result: if position #1 changes when a weight moves ten points, the top two are a coin flip — pick the one you can operate better.
Where this leads
This is the thinking behind our Roadmap work. If you want it applied to your shop, start where we start: the Jewelry Commerce Diagnostic is free — we analyze your shop, brand and market, and tell you what to fix first, in plain language.
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