Welcome to Coffee News PHX
✦ West Valley's Weekly Smile Since 1988 ✦
Are you a…
☕ Help us help our neighbors! Privacy-friendly analytics show Coffee News what on this site actually helps local folks find what they need. No ads, and we never sell your data.
Short answer: yes, if your customers live within the area you serve.
I'm saying this from personal experience. Here's how it sold me a business, what I've learned, and how to tell whether print makes sense for you.
Effective marketing is close to a lost art, considering every 20-year-old runs an ad agency now. It's not as easy as throwing money at ads.
I'd just started my own door-to-door marketing company, meaning I generated real leads for real small businesses. I didn't have an office.
Dad raised me to be frugal,
so I worked out of McDonald's for four hours a day, then went out in the field to generate business.
Sitting in that McDonald's every day was a stack of Coffee News.
I saw it day after day. I watched people walk in, grab a copy, and read it with their coffee. Some took it; most put it back.
On day ten, I started getting ideas about how I could use it for my own business and for my clients.
By day twenty-one, I'd decided I should call the owner to ask whether he'd ever think about selling.
Then it took me another three weeks to actually pick up the phone.
The paper, though.
Every week, it was refilled.
And the readers never left.
It stayed in front of me, and it stayed relevant. Like it does for all of us, doubt stopped me from calling. I heard the whispers in my head: "Who are you to think you can own a business?"
Maybe I wasn't ready for something like that, I thought. "I'm only a salesman," I reminded myself... until one day, I made the call.
We met at that same McDonald's the next Tuesday, had a few meetings back and forth, and on March 24th, we shook hands.
That's how print advertising works. Almost nobody sees an ad once and calls that afternoon (unless the problem is really bad). They see it, and see it again, and keep seeing it, and when the need finally shows up, you're the name they know.
I'll give the skeptics this: fewer people (under the age of 45) read print than they used to. Print is no longer where people go to be entertained. Smartphones won that fight.
In marketing, the question shouldn't be, "How can I be entertaining?"
The question should be, "What kind of marketing reaches and sells to our ICP (Ideal Client Profile)?"
The median age of a daily print newspaper reader is 57.9 years old, according to Nielsen Scarborough.
That's the person with disposable income.
That's the homeowner. That's the person who often has no car payment, who needs a will, whose plumbing has been acting up for months, and who's been putting off pest control.
They don't trust two guys dancing on a screen. They trust the staple company in the community that's in their paper.
They think, "They're the ones who can fix it."
Compare that to the feed. Sure, an owner can do a silly dance in front of the shop and get 100,000 views. That's fun.
But where are those 100,000 people? The analytics might say 42% are in your state, but about two-thirds of Instagram's audience is 18 to 34. TikTok skews even younger, reaching about 65% of U.S. adults 18 to 24. Snapchat's biggest group is 18 to 24. Even the largest age groups on LinkedIn and X (Twitter) are 25 to 34. Those are people just getting to the age where there's some extra money, and often in the middle of raising a young family.
People who read the newspaper? They're local, they're mostly homeowners, and they can actually pay for the service.
That's what surprised me most when I got into this business. The total audience for print may be smaller than it used to be, but the number of qualified buyers it reaches is the same as or higher than any other platform. You aren't paying to reach everybody. You're paying to reach the people who matter.
Before and After Plumbing started advertising with Coffee News about 14 years ago. At the time, it was one truck: the owner, doing all the work himself.
Today they run a fleet of more than five trucks, and they're still with us.
I'm sure he markets in other places now. Every growing business does. Through all that growth, Coffee News has stayed in his plan and in his budget. When the paper changed hands from the previous owner to me, he didn't hesitate. He didn't care who owned it. He wanted everything to stay the same because it keeps working. He's told me more than once that he loves being in the restaurants every single week.
Nobody keeps paying for something for 14 years unless it's making them money.
One of our advertisers is a financial company that knows the power of all kinds of marketing and spends thousands every month on it. They run a lot of print and some Google Ads, and they track everything: call tracking, Google tracking, the works.
When I took over, he told me that some months Coffee News brings him as much business as the larger, more "respected" newspapers around Phoenix, or more.
He admitted he'd been hesitant at first. He's in finance, and he prefers to be in serious publications. Ours is a fun paper, with jokes, trivia, and short stories. But the numbers weren't funny. One of the first things he asked me was whether I planned to expand, because he wants to be in more editions and spend more money with us.
The ads that win aren't always the best-looking ones. They're the ones with the clearest message. A working ad has:
Here's the difference. "We're here for all your landscaping needs" says nothing. "We make your house the gathering place" says everything. Good landscaping makes people want to come over and hang out at your place.
Sell that, not the service list.
They don't wait long enough.
A person needs to see something somewhere between 8 and 12 times before they really start to trust it. Remember my McDonald's story: day 21 before I decided, then three more weeks before I acted. Your customers work the same way (unfortunately).
That's why how often a paper or magazine comes out matters, as well as where it's distributed.
Coffee News is weekly, so your ad gets seen week after week, in places people go.
A monthly magazine might put you in front of someone once, at a doctor's office.
With a weekly paper, those 8 to 12 times build up on their own, without you or a marketing agency having to manufacture them.
My advice on day one: write a clear ad, commit long enough to get those repetitions, and don't judge it after two weeks.
People ask me whether they should do print or Facebook and Google. My answer: it's both, and the right mix depends on your business and your budget.
If you sell something you can ship anywhere in the country or the world, go heavy on digital. That's where your customers are.
If you run a local service business and you aren't spending $10,000 to $20,000 a month on marketing with a really good agency, there isn't a higher-leverage move than print. Coffee News runs about $2.75 to $5 per thousand readers. It's hard to find a cheaper way to put your name in front of a list of ideal customers.
Here's what most people don't think about. Google sells the same lead to you and to your competitors. When someone fills out a form, they're often getting quotes from three or four companies at once.
If your sales process isn't dialed in, that turns into a price war. You win the job by being the cheapest, your margins shrink, and you end up running a volume business that keeps your trucks moving and your employees busy without making much money.
It's a lot like restaurants on Grubhub and Uber Eats. The apps take a big commission. They still have value: the food doesn't go to waste, and the extra volume gives the restaurant more buying power. But nobody gets rich on those orders.
A trusted local paper works differently.
At Coffee News, each category is exclusive, so one plumber, one dentist, one financial advisor. When a reader calls you, they aren't calling your competitor from the same page. They've seen your name for weeks and already trust you a little. That's a warmer call with better margins.
Not all print is equal. Before you sign with anyone, including me, here's what I'd look at.
I'd ask a few questions.
Do you have a sign on your building? Business cards? Do you believe in coupons?
All of that is print. We just stopped calling it print. Nobody thinks their storefront sign is a dead marketing channel.
Then I'd ask this: do you really understand the numbers your digital marketing reports to you? Views, impressions, clicks, reach. There are many ways to make those numbers look good. The question is whether anything moved the needle. Can you point to a week where you ran an ad and revenue went up? With so many metrics available, it's easy for anyone to spin a report so it looks like the job got done.
I'm not against digital advertising. It's important, it has its place, and with the right sales process behind it, it can be powerful. But for building local name recognition, reaching people who can actually buy, and doing it at the lowest cost per thousand readers, I haven't found anything better than print. And I believe Coffee News is the best value in print.
It worked on me. A stack of papers in a McDonald's put the same name in front of me every day until I bought the company.
It's worked for a plumber for 14 years and 5+ trucks. It's working for a financial advisor who tracks every call and wants to spend more.
If your customers are local, print shouldn't be a "should we?" decision. It should be one of the first things in your marketing plan. Write a clear message, own your category, show up every week, and give it enough time to work.
