Spotlight on Alicia Whalen: marketing in the digital age

A veteran of the travel industry, Alicia Whalen has witnessed first-hand the evolution of online marketing, from the early days of the Internet to an era where literacy in Facebook and Twitter is both a job requirement and expectation of customers.

While travel wasn’t a part of her formal studies, Whalen landed her first marketing position in the industry with Marriott in 1998, shortly after graduating university with a degree in business communications. From there, she has gone to work with a variety of brands including Nova Scotia Tourism, Ottawa Tourism, Destination Halifax, The Shaw Festival Theatre and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, working on the social media aspect of the latter’s ‘Everyone’s An Original’ campaign.

“I was very lucky to get that role outside of school,” Whalen recalled. “I never studied any of this in school – I grew up with it and into it. I fell upon it honestly. At the end of the day, it’s all marketing, whether it’s digital or not.”

At the dawn of the social media age in 2005, Whalen co-founded A Couple of Chicks, a digital marketing firm aimed at the travel trade, providing education and consulting services to the industry. Not content to sit still, Whalen’s latest Endeavour is Hashtagio, which she describes as “a tool for marketers to take control of their social media content.”

“What everyone’s talking about lately is how marketers don’t own their content on social media,” she explained. “Billions of dollars are being spent on driving traffic assets we don’t own, with platforms like Facebook controlling how we deliver content to our fans. The solution was born out of this need to give marketers control of their assets and to integrate them into transaction points like websites and leverage user generated content happening around the brand."

Whalen will be part of a panel at the Travel MarketPlace conference taking place this week in Toronto, discussing the latest digital marketing trends and their effective use in the travel industry, including public relations and social media. The presentation will be aimed at agents and suppliers alike.

“At the end of the day, we’re all marketers,” she said. “We’re all living online and connected. It sort of crosses sectors but we’ll be as specific as possible to who’s in the audience and make direct comparisons.”

According to Whalen, having a good ear for social media chatter and applying it effectively to marketing plans is a key skill for the travel trade to master.

“It’s about honing and organizing and making use of that content, as well as understanding what consumers are looking for and making adjustments to strategies as a brand overall,” she said. “We don’t understand the advantage of listening to social channels and using it as a communication vehicle as well. Customers now expect you to respond and acknowledge them no matter what the issue.”

And for agents especially, the social media boom is a largely untapped marketing resource.

“I think that social media has given the travel agent more of a tool than ever before to illustrate that user experience,” Whalen explained. “The agency world hasn’t yet grasped this opportunity yet. Major brands, destinations, OTAs and hotel chains have all aggressively jumped into the digital advertising space. But the agency world will benefit the most from this. The digital space has made the buying of travel very complicated and disconnected and that’s where I see a huge opportunity for agents, bringing a different level of expertise.”

With Travel Marketplace 2015 taking place June 16-17, PAX is profiling some of the notable presenters at the event. A full list of speakers and event details can be found at www.travelmarketplace.com.