The Channels Your Media Plan Is Ignoring

Every franchise marketer I talk to right now is staring at the same problem: Google and Meta efficiencies are declining, year over year over year, and nobody's replaced them with anything. So we keep pouring more dollars into channels that are working less and less, and calling it strategy.

I brought Chris McGee, VP of Marketing at Batteries Plus, and Karen Wenning, Director of Client Partnerships at Suttle Strauss, onto the podcast to talk about what's actually filling that gap. And the conversation got real fast — starting with an icebreaker about what channel they'd ban from every franchisee's local plan. Chris didn't hesitate: direct mail, or at least the version of direct mail she inherited. "That piece of mail at scale actually cost X," she said. "And yes, you did see one person or maybe 10 walk in with that piece of mail, but that ROI is extremely inefficient." The mail wasn't the problem. The lack of strategy behind it was.

That distinction matters, because Karen has a product that makes direct mail strategic again. Her connected mail program layers social and digital touchpoints — QR codes, retargeting, informed delivery emails — on top of the physical piece, so a prospect gets three to five touches before the mailer even arrives, and seven to ten total by the time the campaign runs its course. Karen put the result plainly: those leads "are converting at three times the rate of the prospects." Not three times the engagement. Three times the rate of becoming an actual paying customer.

But the most useful part of this conversation wasn't the tactic. It was Karen's honesty about when not to use it. Asked if she'd recommend connected mail for a brand like Smoothie King, she said no without flinching — "everybody eats," so there's no specific enough audience to target, and the math doesn't work on a $10 smoothie. Where it works is membership-based businesses with constant churn: fitness, childcare, swim schools. Categories where you genuinely need to keep refilling the top of the funnel because your customer base ages out by design.

Chris brought the other half of the equation — what it looks like to build media maturity at scale. Batteries Plus moved from store-level, owner-dictated spend to market-level pooled budgets running through an agency, then layered in marketing mix modeling to validate channel decisions with real data. The payoff: a 25% increase in reach and nearly double the impressions this year, largely by shifting local dollars into cable television instead of letting only the highest-spending stores afford TV. My warning for brands tempted to push everything into the ad fund: every channel's efficiency degrades over time as audiences get used to seeing it. The fix isn't more spend in one place — it's a genuinely diversified mix.

Both guests landed on the same closing point, even though they came at it from completely different ends of the sophistication spectrum: stop spraying and praying. Karen's version was about personalization in the creative. Chris's was about breaking down the silos between organic social, SEO, and GEO so the brand isn't telling five disconnected stories across five channels.

So here's the question worth sitting with before your 2027 budget gets locked: if you stripped out Google and Meta entirely, what would actually be left in your plan — and would you trust it to fill the funnel?

This post was inspired by a conversation with Chris McGee, VP of Marketing, Batteries Plus and Karen Wenning, Director of Client Partnerships, Suttle Strauss, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in September 2026. Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/JJA_qkeE9JQ