Why I created Benidorm Brief

I recently launched a new project called Benidorm Brief, an English-language news and information platform covering what is happening in and around Benidorm.

On the surface, the idea is pretty simple.

Benidorm has an enormous English-speaking audience. There are people who live here permanently, people who own homes here, people who spend several months of the year here and huge numbers of visitors who return year after year.

Then there are those who might only visit once or twice a year but still follow what is happening in Benidorm when they are back home.

Benidorm means something to them.

I wanted to create something for that audience.

Benidorm Brief covers local news, events, tourism, transport, businesses, restaurants, sport and everyday life around the city. The aim is to provide useful English-language information for people who live here, people who are visiting and people elsewhere who simply love Benidorm.

There are already some very successful Benidorm communities online, particularly on Facebook, but I wanted to approach things slightly differently.

Rather than creating another general discussion group, I wanted to build something that feels more like a local news and information service: individual stories throughout the day, useful updates when something happens and regular briefings that bring together the things worth knowing.

But there was another very deliberate piece of thinking behind Benidorm Brief.

Building an audience that already cares about Benidorm

A significant part of my working life these days involves CF Benidorm, and one of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is how we grow the club’s audience.

Attracting supporters to a football club at our level presents a different challenge to working around a club such as Liverpool.

Liverpool already has millions of people looking for Liverpool content every day. You don’t have to persuade people that Liverpool Football Club is interesting before you can speak to them about it.

With CF Benidorm, we’re still building that audience.

Obviously we promote fixtures. We produce posters. We push ticket information. We publish interviews, photographs and videos. We try to give supporters reasons to engage with the club and come along to the Guillermo Amor.

All of that is important.

But I started thinking about the problem from another direction.

Instead of constantly trying to find football supporters and convince them that they should suddenly become interested in CF Benidorm, why not also build an audience consisting of people who are already interested in Benidorm?

There are thousands upon thousands of English-speaking people with an emotional connection to this city.

Some of them might not even know that Benidorm has a football club — and, from conversations I’ve had, I know that’s more common than you might think.

They might not know who the CF Benidorm manager is.

They might not know which league we play in.

They might never have been inside the Guillermo Amor.

But they already care about Benidorm.

That gives us something to work with.

Introducing the club naturally

Imagine somebody follows Benidorm Brief because they want to know about a new restaurant opening, tomorrow’s weather warning, a local fiesta, changes to the roads or what hotel occupancy is looking like.

They aren’t following because of football.

Then, among all of those stories, they see that CF Benidorm have won again.

A few days later they see that there’s a home game at the Guillermo Amor on Sunday.

Then perhaps they see photographs of supporters enjoying themselves at the match.

Maybe eventually they think: We’re in Benidorm this weekend. Why don’t we go?

That’s the opportunity.

I’m quite open about the fact that helping CF Benidorm reach a wider English-speaking audience was one of the reasons I created Benidorm Brief.

There is no reason to pretend otherwise.

But the important part of the strategy is that Benidorm Brief has to be worth following regardless of whether somebody has any interest in football whatsoever.

If people only see CF Benidorm promotion every time they visit the page, they’ll stop following it.

The value has to come first.

People need to follow because Benidorm Brief keeps them informed about a city they care about.

Football then becomes one part of that wider picture.

And CF Benidorm is part of Benidorm. It is the city’s football club. So when there’s something worth reporting — a big result, an important fixture, a new signing, something happening around the supporters or another development at the club — it belongs naturally alongside everything else happening in the city.

That’s very different from repeatedly advertising a football match to an audience that hasn’t shown any interest in either the club or Benidorm.

We’re starting with the connection that already exists.

The audience is potentially much bigger than the football audience

This is probably the key point.

The potential audience for Benidorm is considerably larger than the existing audience for CF Benidorm.

So rather than restricting ourselves to the pool of people who already follow the club, Benidorm Brief gives me the opportunity to build relationships with a much larger community.

If that platform becomes successful in its own right, it can do all sorts of things.

It can highlight local businesses.

It can promote events.

It can provide useful information to residents and tourists.

It can support community initiatives.

It can give English-speaking people a better understanding of what is happening locally.

And occasionally it can introduce somebody who loves Benidorm to the football club representing the city.

Even if only a small percentage of that wider audience eventually develops an interest in CF Benidorm, that could still represent a meaningful number of new supporters.

What could that audience look like?

Benidorm Brief is still very new, but the early growth has been encouraging. The Facebook page has reached more than 200 followers in its first few weeks, and that has been achieved while the project is still finding its feet.

There is obviously no guarantee that growth will continue at the same rate, and social media audiences rarely grow in a straight line. But if Benidorm Brief continues gaining traction over the coming months, it is reasonable to think we could be looking at an audience of several thousand people by the beginning of the 2027/28 football season. Reaching somewhere around 5,000 followers within that sort of timeframe would be a fantastic target.

The interesting thing, though, is that the value doesn’t necessarily require an enormous audience.

Five thousand people who are specifically interested in Benidorm is an extremely targeted audience. If just 2% of those people eventually became interested enough in CF Benidorm to attend a match occasionally, that’s 100 potential supporters. If the audience eventually reached 10,000, the same tiny conversion would represent 200 people.

And that’s before considering the people those followers might bring with them.

Not everyone who follows Benidorm Brief needs to become a CF Benidorm supporter. Most probably won’t, and that’s absolutely fine. The page needs to work for people who simply want to know what’s happening in Benidorm.

But if a relatively small percentage of a growing audience discovers the football club through it, starts following the results and eventually decides to spend a Sunday morning at the Guillermo Amor, that begins to demonstrate why building an audience around the city could become so valuable to the club.

It is already creating other opportunities

One of the encouraging things is that Benidorm Brief is already beginning to create connections beyond its own audience.

It is now providing some news content for Fresh Radio Spain.

That gives the content another route to an established English-speaking audience on the Costa Blanca.

And that is exactly the sort of network effect I had in mind.

A story may start with Benidorm Brief, reach people through Fresh Radio, be shared into another community and ultimately put Benidorm — and occasionally CF Benidorm — in front of somebody we wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

It’s not about continually shouting, “Come and watch our football team.”

It’s about building audiences, creating useful content and allowing people to discover the club naturally through their existing interest in the city.

Playing the long game

Having spent most of my professional life building football audiences online, I’ve learned that genuine communities aren’t created simply by asking people to follow something.

You have to give them a reason to keep coming back.

That’s what I want Benidorm Brief to become.

First and foremost, I want it to be a useful English-language source of news, events and information about Benidorm.

If people begin checking it every morning to see what’s happening, if they share stories with friends coming over on holiday, if residents use it to keep up with local developments and businesses see value in being featured, then we’ve built something worthwhile.

And once you’ve built a genuine audience around the city, opportunities naturally follow.

One of those opportunities is undoubtedly CF Benidorm.

I want more people to know about the club.

I want more English-speaking residents and visitors walking through the gates at the Guillermo Amor.

I want somebody who has been holidaying in Benidorm for twenty years but never considered going to a football match to suddenly realise that there’s a club here worth following.

I’m not hiding that objective. It’s part of the reason Benidorm Brief exists.

But the way to achieve it isn’t by turning Benidorm Brief into one long advertisement for CF Benidorm.

It’s by making Benidorm Brief good enough that people who care about Benidorm choose to follow it.

Then every now and again we can introduce them to another part of the city they might not have discovered yet.

And if Benidorm Brief can turn even a small part of that much larger Benidorm audience into people who also start following CF Benidorm, it will be doing exactly what I hoped it would do when I created it.

There’s also a personal benefit to building Benidorm Brief as something independent of the club. Whatever happens in the future, it gives me a project I can remain enthusiastic about and an audience I can continue to inform and engage with.