Are you thinking or opening a business in Playa Del Carmen? Perhaps you are a new business owner and want to advertise your business. How do you do this? Marketing in Playa Del Carmen is most likely very different from where you are from. How is it different and what are some tips for you to best reach your customers?
Playa Del Carmen Marketing Strategies
Many people move to Mexico thinking that owning a business and retiring soon after, is the life. For those that get through all the paperwork of actually opening a business, next comes getting it open and advertising it. It can be very hard and confusing trying to figure out how to do this. Not only is Playa Del Carmen marketing hard, it is also a foreign country with it’s own particularities.
Advertising in some countries is a true art form. There are multi million dollar agencies that will deliver you the sales you want and promote your image. However in Mexico marketing is years if not decades behind. Many businesses in Mexico simply don’t advertise. This can be a reprieve from the constant bombardment of advertising and junk mail in other countries but advertising can be a good thing linking customers to products that you want. Next we will discus why Playa Del Carmen marketing is so hard.
Why Playa Del Carmen is a hard market to advertise in
Here are 7 things that make it hard to advertise in Playa Del Carmen. We will discuss below how you can overcome these.
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Playa Del Carmen is a very international market.
You have multiple language groups like English and Spanish among others. You have to think about your target language and how to reach them.
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There are thousands of tourist that come daily to Playa Del Carmen.
People stay for about a week and that is a challenge to reach new people each week. In other cities that are less tourist oriented you can advertise to residents and then they know about your business. You can advertise every once in a while to remind people about your services. In Playa Del Carmen however that is much harder with a transient flow.
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There is no centralized place to advertise.
The Playa Del Carmen marketing scene is fractured between , print, radio, TV, billboard and internet advertising. This means picking the best places to market your business where you think you will best reach your consumers. It also means spending on several different avenues of marketing.
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Advertising venues are sometimes too good at advertising themselves.
This means that when you look for places to advertise it can be confusing to actually know which one reaches the most people and those that will be your target audience.
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You cannot do it by yourself anymore.
The idea of giving people the power to do anything online and promote your business has passed. You can post on your own Facebook page and even open one for a business. You can tweet all you want but no one really uses Twitter anymore. You can post photos on instagram but people find that just because you get a like, this does not equal a sale. You can have a website but people need to find it. With all this in mind you really need to have a platform to work from. This means going to a media source that has the power to get out your message.
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As mentioned above, social media is a full time job and even then, it might not really deliver.
There are social media managers. Should you hire one? This is another area where you have to make a good decision. There are many people that say they are a social media manager but only tweet, post and comment for you. Much of things like tweeting are irrelevant nowadays. It can be a full time job just to reach a few people. Truly having a professional on your side is better and you have to see if it is worth it. In the end these people still have to reach out to media venues to get out your message.
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You partially need to know advertising and understand how advertisers will work for you.
It an be easy to make a placement of an ad sound like a good opportunity. But actually knowing if that internet page will get hits or views can be hard. You need to know what is the best place, for example on a website, which page is good for you. It can mean the difference in 10,000’s views per month which page or where your ad is.
The first thing you need to do when planning marketing
The first thing you need to think about is where are your customers and who are they. It will depend on the type of business you have if you need more tourist or locals or a mix of both. Since most people open bars, restaurants and service businesses in Playa Del Carmen we can focus on talking a little more about them.
Where are your customers and how to reach them? If you are targeting tourist you need to know where their eyes are. How do people research their trip and what do they look at. This can mean thinking about online advertising since most tourist come from outside the area and they do not have access to print, radio, billboard, or TV advertising. It is a fact that most tourist look online to plan out their trip.
Ask your customers
One important thing pre-existing business owners can do is ask their customer how they found out about their business. This can give you valuable insight into how your existing customers found you and what they used to research their trip. Some will tell you about websites and places that you cannot actually advertise on. You can however focus on what avenues you can place an ad or get into.
Word of mouth advertising
Some businesses we know here in Playa Del Carmen have opened with the idea of providing a good service and letting word of mouth do the talking. Certainly having a good product is a great start. However we know of some great restaurants that just do not do well because they only relied on word or mouth. This approach to marketing can fail because:
- Word of mouth can be slow. After a month or a few months only a few people now know about your business.
- The words of tourist leaves with them and you need to have a source that will tell people about places. This is where reviews come in handy and knowing local influential people and places to get the word out. Places where the word reaches people and keeps reaching people. That is one of the reasons we do reviews and guides to Playa Del Carmen so people can find good businesses here. We have helped over a half a million people find information about Playa Del Carmen.
What about marketing on Facebook?
One popular online advertising venue is Facebook. Many people are on Facebook and Facebook promotes this as a great way to advertise. The problem with this is, Facebook cannot know who is coming to Playa Del Carmen. If you advertise and select people in Playa Del Carmen, well then you are reaching locals or people here. This might not be your target audience and if you are going after tourist, it opens the chance to advertise in many countries but you still do not know which of the millions of people might be coming to Mexico. So for many business owners Facebook is not a good option for trying to advertise to tourist.
Playa Del Carmen marketing on Facebook however can be good for some local businesses that target locals. Since this social platform is used by so many, you can reach people here. However it should be noted that you need to calculate the cost of marketing with Facebook and compare it will other venues.
Of course print, radio and TV media cannot tell you exactly where their viewers are or how many exactly see it. Websites however can tell you exactly how many and in what countries they are from. This can be helpful in knowing what website reaches certain markets and the amount of people.
What about a Facebook page vs. website?
As mentioned above, trying to market yourself is a hard task. Actually using social media to your advantage takes a platform. Some businesses think that having a Facebook page will be enough. But how will people find it and does simply posting pictures and comments bring you business?
If you have a popular business you might have a big fan base. This means that you can reach these people when you post right? No. Facebook makes it a formula for who receives your post. This is not a bad thing for the individual. People would turn off Facebook if you got every post from every person and business you like or are friends with. This means people only see a few post you might make.
Having a Facebook page is a tool but only part of your marketing. You really have to think about how people search. Google is where people go and Facebook pages are not high in search results. Websites often rank higher if you have your own website for your business. You can also rank higher in certain categories of search results.
In the end having either a Facebook page or website is good but you have to remember people only find this if they are searching for your business exactly. It still takes more marketing to get word out.
Tips for getting your name right
One tip we want to offer businesses opening in Playa Del Carmen is about your name. This can be very important to get this right for several reasons.
First off your business name should sound good in both English and Spanish. these are the two most important languages spoken in Playa. If your name is a pun on a word in one language it could end up just being confusing in another. Also knowing the cultures helps. For example a floral company wanted to open a wedding service here. The asked us what we thought of the name “Vanilla”. they liked it because it was a beautiful flower and popular in Mexican culture. We highlighted the fact that in English speaking North America it usually means “simple” or “boring”. They had no idea and hence did not name their business that.
Your business name for the digital world and marketing
Another big tip for you about your business name is to think about the digital world. How things are searched for and found will effect your business. Here are some examples.
- Don’t get fancy with hyphens. Actually don’t use them. Google only allows you to search words so then it becomes an issue if your name is one word or to.
- Be consistent with spelling and form. For example if you name your place PuroPlaya. It is a good name but if people see your website www.PuroPlaya.com They will not know if your name is “Puro Playa” or “Puroplaya”. It becomes important how people can find you in google. You might get great reviews online but people might not see them if they google the other form of the name.
- A new condo building in Playa was recently named “It Condo”. That is fine but when someone wants to find out more about it and searches “It Condo” every website for every condo comes up because the search words are very common. Almost ever condo website will be listed because they have the two words on their websites. Choose a name that is unique but still easy to remember.
Sometimes it is more location then marketing
No doubt one of the best places in Playa Del Carmen for a business is on 5th Avenue. This is why rents are so high there. You have thousands of people walking by your doors every day. Many people just walk in a business because they are there or it looks nice. It has nothing to do with advertising, just location.
In fact many places on 5th Avenue do little advertising because they have so many people passing by. Only when there is much competition for a service do businesses look to promote themselves. It can also be that certain businesses on 5th Avenue are not in the most desirable location. Yes, even location on 5th Avenue matters.
This is why picking a location is so important for your business in Playa Del Carmen. Some people look at real estate and rentals thinking that just a block or even half a block off 5th Avenue would be a suitable location for their establishment. In about 6 months many people realize there that was a miscalculation and the slight discount in the price of rent meant a huge discount in the amount of people coming.
Get to know Playa Del Carmen
Knowing Playa Del Carmen can take a while. It means knowing traffic flows and what the future of certain areas are going to be like. One service we offer to readers and people looking to open a business in Playa Del Carmen is location services. There are certain areas of the city that are better for certain businesses and even block by block difference.
We hope if you are opening a new business you will let us know here so we can help people find good businesses in the area. We wish anyone opening a new business here in Playa Del Carmen success.
If you are opening a business in Playa Del Carmen you might also like to read our article where we interviewed a business owner on 5th Avenue. You might also like to read our large article about opening a business in Playa Del Carmen.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article about Playa Del Carmen marketing and how to navigate it. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment below.
About The Author
We have been looking to open a business in Playa Del Carmen and are now working on a marketing plan. This article has been helpful and gives us some good factors to consider.
Good tips for marketing in Playa del Carmen. It is a tough market with so many tourist and language groups.
We ran a business in Playa del Carmen for three years. We realized that it as very hard to get word out about our place. There is no main place people are and it is such a fragmented market. I learned in the end to think like the customer and google what I wanted. We sold the business and now are living in Tulum where there is even less media but we love it.