Meet the People Who Make Digital Influence Tick
Digital Influence is a Christchurch-based digital marketing agency of specialists in SEO, Google Ads, Meta advertising, video and photo production, social media and strategy. We're a Google Partner and a Meta Business Partner, working with hospitality, retail & ecommerce, trades, automotive and professional service businesses across New Zealand.
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Our Team
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Annabel is our Marketing Executive, and she owns Digital Influence's own brand, lead generation and digital presence. Social, events and seminars, campaigns, the website — if it's us marketing us, it's hers. She also looks after all the marketing for the Marketing 4 Business podcast.
It's a job with an obvious catch: she has to make the things we recommend to clients actually work on our own business. That's a useful kind of pressure. She works directly with the wider team on the campaigns that drive awareness, bring in inbound leads and put the results we get for clients in front of the people who need to see them.
Outside work she's at Sumner beach on a weekend morning with her labradoodle Barney, or working through Christchurch's ever-growing list of new hospo spots.
Bachelor of Land and Property Management, Majoring in Marketing - Lincoln University
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Isabella is a Digital Marketing Account Coordinator in our strategy pod. Her job is keeping accounts and projects moving, sitting between clients and our internal team so work gets planned, communicated, approved and delivered when it was meant to be.
She's the go-to here for organisation and planning, and for knowing exactly where everything is at. What's due, who has it, what's waiting on whom. She's also our proofreader, which is a quiet but useful thing to have in a team producing this much content.
The part of the job she's best at is translation. Marketing generates a lot of complicated updates, and turning those into something a client can read in thirty seconds and actually understand is a genuine skill. Ask anyone here who they'd want writing the client update, and it's Isabella.
Outside work she's a reader and a writer, and can usually be found baking, walking Hagley Park with a coffee, or watching cricket in summer.
Bachelor of Communication, Majoring in Communication Strategy and Practise - University of Canterbury
Jean is a Graphic Designer at Digital Influence, creating digital and marketing assets across email, social, advertising and campaign work, in print and digital both.
She's the go-to here for turning a rough marketing concept into polished, production-ready creative, and for email design specifically: making a campaign look cohesive and on-brand rather than like a template someone filled in. She also handles brand consistency and visual direction, which in practice means being the person who works out how to make something look right when a concept needs a creative solution rather than just execution.
Outside work she draws, and takes aesthetic screenshots in games and edits them afterwards. By her own admission, that's how she learned half the Photoshop functions she knows.
Bachelor of Design Innovation - Victoria University of Wellington
Google Ads Search & Creative Certification - Google
Jonte is a Digital Marketing Advertising Specialist at Digital Influence, working on Google Ads for our strategy clients. He plans the strategy, builds the ads, and then spends most of his time optimising — managing bid strategies and planning keywords so campaigns are reaching the people actually searching for what the client sells.
The other half of his job is the part nobody notices until it's wrong. He sets up Google Tag Manager and GA4 tracking so conversions are captured accurately across a client's site. Get that wrong and every report after it is fiction, which is why it's worth having someone who cares about it.
He's the go-to here for Google Ads, tracking setup and keyword planning. The work he's proudest of so far has been pivoting the strategy on a few accounts and watching the results come through.
Outside work he's at the gym, with friends, or watching a film.
Bachelor of Communications — University of Canterbury
Google Ads Search Certification — Google
Google Ads Display Certification — Google
Google Ads Shopping Certification — Google
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Lily is a Digital Marketing Specialist in our strategy pod, working across web design, UX, content and search. The bridge between how a website looks and how it performs.
Most of her week goes on client sites: designing and building landing pages in Webflow, writing and optimising content, mapping page structures and fixing what's broken. She came in from the marketing side, then studied Web Design and Development at Ara to build out the technical half, which is why she can handle both ends of a project. She's the go-to here for web design, UX and website content, particularly when a project has to look good and rank at the same time.
The newer part of her work is AEO and GEO. Structuring sites and content so they get surfaced and cited by AI search rather than just ranked by Google. It's a genuinely new discipline and most of what's written about it is guesswork. Lily is one of the people here actually testing what works.
Outside work she's with her partner and family, at Orana Wildlife Park and Willowbank, or at home with her cat and two pet hedgehogs.
Diploma in Web Design and Development — Ara Institute of Canterbury
Lucy is our Growth Team Lead. She looks after the growth pod, works across Meta ads and client strategy, and spends a lot of her week in front of clients.
That last part is what she's best at. Because she's in so many client conversations, she tends to be the person who actually knows what a client wants. Not just the brief they wrote, but the thing behind it. A surprising amount of marketing goes wrong at exactly that point.
The rest of her focus is organic social and branding: helping businesses figure out what to say, how to look, and how to grow without relying purely on ad spend. She's good on social trends, which in practice means knowing which ones are worth a client's time and which are noise.
Outside work she's a serious bookworm, does pilates, is trying to be more creative in her downtime, and is aunty to Beau, who she'd like it noted is the cutest little boy in the world.
Diploma in Digital Design and Marketing — Yoobee College
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Lukas is a Video Production Specialist at Digital Influence. He works across high-end videography and photography, brand-level films, and creative short-form video for social. The kind built to actually get shared rather than just fill a slot in a content calendar.
His week splits in two. Most of it is on site with our partners, directing and guiding them through a shoot and capturing the video and photography. The rest is back at the office editing, which is where he's most particular: cutting, colour grading, audio analysis, and getting the finished video to match the brand's tone of voice rather than just looking nice on its own.
He's the person here for high-end production and the technical side of media, and he's fully self-taught. Which is worth mentioning, because you wouldn't guess it from the work.
He's also doing Toastmasters, which is a useful thing for someone who spends his days telling other people how to look natural on camera.
Outside work he's at the gym or working on his video skills. He fairly well lives and breathes videography.
Meg is a Content Creator and Podcast Producer at Digital Influence, where she edits most of the podcasts we produce, including Marketing 4 Business and Between the Pours. She's also one of our videographers and editors.
Audio is her thing. She studied Radio at the New Zealand Broadcasting School and has Grade 5 Music Theory from Trinity, which shows up in the work more than you'd expect. She cuts music to picture so it actually lands, rather than just fading it under and hoping. She's also good at the less technical half: coaching people who've never been in front of a microphone until they forget it's there.
If there's an audio question at DI, it comes to Meg. Outside work she sings in a barbershop choir and is a committed scrapbooker.
Bachelor of Communications (Radio) — New Zealand Broadcasting School
Morgan is a Video Editor at Digital Influence. Footage and a brief come in, and his job is to find the story in it and cut it together. Including the sound design, which is the part most people don't notice until it's done badly.
He's self-taught. Two years of freelance work alongside another job, learning from people in the industry as he went, which tends to produce editors who are good at working out how to get something done rather than following a process. That's what he's the go-to person for: Premiere Pro specifically, the wider Adobe suite generally, and finding a way around an editing problem when the obvious approach isn't working.
Outside work he's usually training, running, gym, or any other form of exercise going.
Liv is Client Strategy Lead at Digital Influence. She started out as a video creator, moved into implementing SEO, paid ads and content, and now leads the strategy and the team behind it. Which means she's done most of the jobs she's now directing.
Her week is client meetings, team meetings, and a lot of time in the data: taking what a business's numbers are actually saying and turning it into a list of things the team can go and do. She's also the troubleshooter, whether that's a campaign that's stopped working or a piece of software misbehaving.
The thing she's best at is diagnosis. Somewhere between a customer first seeing a business and becoming a sale, something breaks down. Working out exactly where, then fixing that rather than everything around it, is the difference between marketing that spends money and marketing that makes it. It's the question she comes back to on every account.
Outside work she's active. Whether that's running, swimming, biking, or otherwise outside in the sunshine.
Bachelor of Applied Science (Human Nutrition) - Ara Institute of Canterbury
Postgraduate qualification in Digital Marketing - NZIE
Patrick is Strategy Partner Team Lead at Digital Influence. He runs our strategy pod and works across SEO, Google Ads, AI and search visibility, analytics and campaign strategy. 14 years of it, mostly in retail and hospitality across New Zealand and Australia.
He's best known here for search visibility: working out how a business actually appears in Google, and increasingly in AI search, where the answer someone gets from ChatGPT or Gemini matters as much as where you rank. The other half of the job is analytics. Taking a messy pile of performance data and turning it into a short list of things worth doing next. He's most useful when a business has plenty of marketing going on and no clear read on what any of it is doing.
What he spends more time on than anything, though, is translation. Marketing has a lot of jargon and a lot of dashboards, and neither of those helps a business owner make a decision. Patrick's job is to explain what's happening in language you can act on.
Outside the office he's a dad first, so most of his time goes on family and getting the kids out and about. He's also written a sci-fi/fantasy novel, City of Villains.
Bachelor of Film, Media and Communications - University of Otago
Rachel is our Video Content Coach, and she looks after the whole videography process for her clients. Shoot plans built off competitor research and the client's actual goals, the shoot itself, post-production, and the captions to wrap it up. She also manages our content creators and video editors, so the shoot she plans and the edit that follows stay joined up.
The bit she's known for is the coaching. A lot of business owners are genuinely nervous on camera, and the standard advice to relax and be yourself isn't advice. Rachel treats fronting a video as a skill you learn, because it is. Some of her clients started out reading a script off a piece of paper and can now deliver a full video off the top of their heads. Most of them now look forward to shoots. Most.
Outside work Rachel gets completely absorbed in a hobby for somewhere between three days and three months and then never touches it again. So far: painting, crochet, scrapbooking, yoga, running and reading. The constants are reptiles, cooking, and an indoor plant collection that's gradually turning her house into a forest.
Bachelor of Communication — Massey University
Sarah is Creative Director at Digital Influence, leading creative projects from ideation and concept development through to execution and final delivery. That covers video and social content, photoshoots, hero campaigns and the occasional thing that doesn't fit a category.
The work is as much coordination as it is creative. She sits with clients to understand what they're actually trying to achieve, develops the creative direction, briefs the team and the talent, directs on-site shoots, and oversees post-production so the finished thing meets both the strategic and the creative brief. She's the go-to here for turning an idea into a clear, achievable project. The part where a good concept either becomes something real or quietly falls apart.
Outside work she's a committed host, and can usually be found assembling a platter, testing a cocktail recipe or opening a bottle of wine she's just discovered. She's also frequently out on an adventure with her partner and their dog Doug, who has his own Instagram @douglas_diary.
Bachelor of Communication, Majoring in Strategic Communication - University of Canterbury
Will is a Growth Partner Marketing Specialist at Digital Influence, working across our growth partner accounts with Google Ads as his specialism. He builds and launches campaigns structured around what each client is actually trying to achieve, then spends most of his time optimising them, digging into the data and making changes based on what it's telling him rather than on hunches.
He's particularly good on lead generation for service-based businesses, and on keyword research and search term auditing, which is the unglamorous work that stops a client quietly paying for clicks that were never going to convert.
The other half of the job is explaining it. Will keeps clients updated on what's happening and what's changing, and translating account performance into plain English is something he does deliberately rather than as an afterthought. A client who doesn't understand their own reporting can't make decisions about it.
Outside work he plays and watches a lot of sport, and is big on running and fitness.
Bachelor of Commerce, Majoring in Marketing - University of Canterbury
Google Ads Search Certification - Google
Google Ads Display Certification - Google
Google Ads Video Certification - Google
Leadership
Scott is the founder of Digital Influence. He started out in digital marketing around 2000, self-educating and flying to Australia to learn from the best marketers he could find, at a point when most people still weren't sure the internet was going to matter. He was an early adopter of Google Ads back when it was called AdWords, and what pulled him in was the transparency. For the first time, a business owner could see exactly what their marketing was doing. That's still what he's interested in.
He built and sold his first agency, On Page One Media, before starting Digital Influence more than ten years ago. Inside it he's done just about every job there is: writing the ads, running the SEO, writing the articles, shooting the videos, doing the sales, and writing the client reports. That's the reason he can tell you what actually works rather than what's supposed to.
One example of how that thinking shows up: early on, Scott noticed clients were receiving marketing reports and quietly not understanding them. So we started making video reports instead. Slower to produce, but a business owner spending money with you deserves to understand where it's going.
These days his focus is strategy first, and increasingly AI visibility, which is how a business becomes the one that AI recommends. His view is that marketing has become too easy, and the opportunity now sits with the businesses willing to do the thinking that everyone else skips. He's a believer in consistency of message plus frequency of reach, and in know, like and trust: customers learn your character, decide they want to work with you, and then buy because they believe you. Win those three and more people buy from you.
Scott's also been running seminars and workshops for most of his career. He joined Toastmasters early on to learn to present properly, which he was grateful for the first time he spoke to a room of 450 people. He contributed to the book Secrets of Marketing Experts Exposed, and is currently writing one of his own, Marketing That Makes You Money.
On qualifications, he's straightforward: he doesn't hold formal marketing certifications. What he has is 20 years of doing the work and 30-odd years of sitting across the table from business owners, including years in large corporates doing sales, marketing and account management. He calls it a licence in life.
Olivia is Operations Manager and Partner at Digital Influence. She's been here ten of her twelve years in marketing, which makes her Scott's first employee and the person with the longest view of how the agency got to where it is.
She came in from the client side. She was an in-house Marketing Manager who needed help with digital, got introduced to Scott, and found a way of thinking about marketing she hadn't been exposed to before. Strategic, direct response, measurable. She decided that was the world she wanted to be in. Five years of building the business alongside Scott later, he offered her a shareholding.
What she owns now is how the agency actually runs: resourcing and team structure, internal processes, and quality control across everything that goes out the door. She also leads HR and people development, from recruitment and onboarding through to growth plans and performance. On the client side she works directly with a number of key accounts, focused on the strategic end of the relationship. Understanding what the business is trying to achieve, shaping the plan, and making sure the work delivers something measurable.
Ask her what a client would notice if she stopped, and the answer is consistency. Details being right, preferences being followed, the team having the systems to deliver at the same standard every time. When something needs solving quickly, she's usually the one sorting it out behind the scenes.
The project she's most invested in at the moment is building a suite of AI agents and automations that run quietly on every account, monitoring campaign tracking, website performance and data quality, and flagging issues to our specialists before they show up in results. She's also building a dedicated AI knowledge base for each client, capturing brand voice, preferences and project history so every piece of work starts from a real understanding of the business rather than a briefing document. For clients it means faster insights and fewer errors. For the team it means less admin and more time on the work that actually matters.
The thread running through all of it is people. Olivia is genuinely invested in the team growing, through coaching, development pathways, and removing the friction that stops good people doing good work. She can also spot a spelling mistake from a mile away.
Outside work she's a mum to a teenage boy who plays what feels like a million sports a week, and his loudest supporter on the sideline. She's obsessed with her family and her cocker spaniel Russell, loves reading and travelling, and will admit to reality TV.
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