This should definitely be possible. This blog post, although it’s not exactly what you’re looking to do, should give you a good starting point:
Instead of modifying the commit message with [skip ci] you could add variations appropriate to your needs.
Then on CircleCI via circle.yml you can inspect the git commit message (see here for how: Git Commit Message in Environment Variable) and run deployment steps conditionally based on if the relevant string is found in the commit message.
If you get something like that working we’d be delighted if you wanted to share the steps you took / any gotchas.