Ten years ago, Meri­ah John took a chance.

She start­ed a YouTube chan­nel fo­cus­ing on how she would style her hair.

“Every­body was ask­ing me to show them how I do my hair,” said John, “At that point, YouTube was very big and the nat­ur­al hair move­ment was very big. So that was my in­tro­duc­tion to ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ing con­tent and post­ing it on­line. Then I start­ed learn­ing that brands ac­tu­al­ly send peo­ple their prod­ucts to do re­views and tu­to­ri­als, etc. And that kind of opened up my world to re­alise oh my gosh, peo­ple do this as a job.”

Ten years on, John has carved out a suc­cess­ful ca­reer in in­te­grat­ed dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing with her brand, Neesh Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, han­dling cam­paigns for sev­er­al com­pa­nies in­clud­ing Massy Mo­tors and Im­mortelle Beau­ty.

She told the Busi­ness Guardian that her suc­cess with these brands was born out of a com­bi­na­tion of her start as a con­tent cre­ator and the tech­niques of tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing.

“Dur­ing these last ten years, I re­alised I am very cre­ative when it comes to shar­ing the things that I like about brands and now they are ask­ing me to do it for them, not as an in­flu­encer but (cre­at­ing) be­hind-the-scenes con­tent,” she said, “I went to school for in­te­grat­ed mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which kind of honed that skill of con­tent cre­ation as well as cre­ative di­rec­tion. But I al­so learnt how to do mar­ket­ing strate­gies. I made a mar­ket­ing plan and a mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, but be­ing able to ex­e­cute it from a con­tent cre­ator’s stand­point.”

She re­alised that with these com­bined strate­gies, her cam­paigns were far more ef­fec­tive.

This saw her piv­ot from con­tent cre­ator and in­flu­encer to the founder of Neesh Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, her brand which she start­ed in De­cem­ber 2020.

“Neesh Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is a play on the word niche, which is like speak­ing di­rect­ly to your tar­get au­di­ence. And ob­vi­ous­ly, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion to com­mu­ni­cate what­ev­er mes­sag­ing and we do dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, con­tent cre­ation and in­flu­encer mar­ket­ing,” she said.

This re­newed fo­cus al­lowed her to tran­scend what would have been con­sid­ered her niche; beau­ty prod­ucts and cre­at­ing cam­paigns for com­pa­nies.

“I stepped away from be­ing an in­flu­encer and just start­ed do­ing mar­ket­ing strate­gies be­cause that is my de­gree. I have a de­gree in in­te­grat­ed mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion (The UWI’s West­ern Ja­maica Cam­pus). So a lot of what I start­ed do­ing was help­ing brands build their mar­ket­ing strate­gies, which would now help them with con­tent cre­ation, as well as in­flu­encer mar­ket­ing. But pri­mar­i­ly dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing was my first ser­vice and be­cause of that, oth­er brands like Massy Mo­tors, would have want­ed some­one to help with the mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. From our so­cial me­dia stand­point, that was re­al­ly how I end­ed up work­ing for brands like that,” said John, who is now launch­ing a fur­ther re­brand so that she can be seen as a to­tal strate­gist as op­posed to an­oth­er in­flu­encer.

John not­ed that cater­ing and cre­at­ing con­tent for a ma­jor brand like Massy Mo­tors var­ied great­ly com­pared to the cam­paigns she would run for small­er busi­ness­es, but she ex­plained that this al­lowed her to grow her strat­e­gy.

“Be­cause Massy Mo­tors is such a big brand, I think there was a lot of prep to do be­fore any­thing could come out. A lot of ap­provals need­ed to hap­pen. I need­ed to get more in­for­ma­tion on what ex­act­ly is hap­pen­ing in the busi­ness for three months in ad­vance. With a small­er brand like Im­mortelle Beau­ty, I’m able to be a lit­tle bit more cre­ative. Stay on trend, I guess. Help them from an in-the-mo­ment stand­point,” she said

She not­ed that T&T has start­ed to em­brace the in­flu­encer cul­ture sig­nif­i­cant­ly in its mar­ket­ing strate­gies, but not­ed that in most cas­es the in­flu­encers hired are not in­flu­encers in the tra­di­tion­al sense of the word.

“I think that in Trinidad and To­ba­go what we see as in­flu­encers ac­tu­al­ly have very dif­fer­ent roles. They fall in­to three dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. I would say that there’s a con­tent cre­ator who is re­al­ly good at cre­at­ing con­tent that I guess earns a fol­low­ing. They are some­times seen as an in­flu­encer. There’s a pop­u­lar per­son who may not cre­ate con­tent, but be­cause they’re pop­u­lar, they’re well known and a lot of peo­ple fol­low them so they are al­so seen as an in­flu­encer. And then you would have per­sons who ac­tive­ly cre­ate con­tent and share their life, which is sup­posed to be what an in­flu­encer is, which is how it start­ed, es­pe­cial­ly in­ter­na­tion­al­ly,” said John.

How­ev­er, she be­lieves that while many brands have turned to these peo­ple to push their brands, there still need­ed to be ad­di­tion­al fo­cus to con­nect with wider au­di­ences and grow brands.

“I think the ap­proach is re­al­ly fig­ur­ing out, based on the brand that I am work­ing on, what are the KPIs (key per­for­mance in­di­ca­tors) for a cam­paign. If they want aware­ness, that might mean we need a pop­u­lar per­son to help get us aware­ness. If it is we need to show a lit­tle bit more about the prod­ucts and how to use it, then maybe we ac­tu­al­ly use some­one who is go­ing to cre­ate the con­tent them­selves and share it with their au­di­ence. And then some­times you re­al­ly just need some­one who is re­al­ly good at cap­tur­ing the con­tent and that’s where the video­g­ra­phers and pho­tog­ra­phers and blog­gers come in­to play,” said John.

De­spite her suc­cess in dig­i­tal me­dia, John told the Busi­ness Guardian that tra­di­tion­al me­dia plat­forms still hold a strong role to play in mar­ket­ing. She ex­plained that while many are flock­ing to so­cial me­dia be­cause of cost, the over­all reach of tra­di­tion­al arms of me­dia can­not be un­der­stat­ed.

At the same time, she al­so felt that tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing strate­gists had not adapt­ed enough to in­clude so­cial me­dia in their cam­paigns. This is where she felt Neesh Com­mu­ni­ca­tions could be a game chang­er.

“I come from the view­point of an in­flu­encer you know, which al­lows me to have this unique per­spec­tive of what can be done with dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and so­cial me­dia, in terms of con­tent cre­ation and us­ing oth­er forms of mar­ket­ing. That’s most­ly what I like to high­light be­cause nor­mal­ly peo­ple use tra­di­tion­al ad­ver­tis­ing agen­cies. You can tell when an ad­ver­tis­ing agency is so by the book that that does not trans­late to so­cial me­dia,” she said.