Building an Instagram Channel from Scratch: Moxy Girl

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The Moxy Girl clothing brand was born out of a mother’s inspiration from her fierce, relentless, unstoppable teenage daughter.

When founder Jeannie Ledesma reached out to me, she had a strong vision for what the company would be: a clothing brand and a community built to celebrate girls accomplishing their dreams and cheering each other on. But it wasn’t your typical female empowerment brand. Moxy Girl celebrates girls and women who have had amazing success despite challenges, setbacks and obstacles that have come their way.

Jeannie had Moxy Girl products ready to sell and was working on a website. She knew she needed a social media presence but wasn’t sure what shape that should take. And she was operating on a small budget to launch the brand.

Develop a Strategy

Before I create any social media content, I work closely with the business owner to develop a strategy to guide us that feels good for everyone.

I worked with Jeannie to determine who her ideal clients were — how old, where they live, what they like, what they don’t, what kind of community they have, what their problems are, how we might solve them, etc. For Moxy Girl, we needed to talk to two groups: teenage girls and mothers of teenage girls.

We then worked our way through what the brand should sound and feel like for followers. We translated this into how the content is written: do we use an informal tone? Do we use academic language? Do we use puns? Do we use proper punctuation, or do we keep it super casual?

I found several existing brands that showed aspects of Moxy Girl’s brand voice in their own content for inspiration. This also helped us see what’s already being covered in the market and find the unique space Moxy Girl fits into.

Create Content

This was Moxy Girl’s Instagram channel before I started working with them.

We made a plan for writing and approving content, finding the right images, and responding to comments. Then we hit the ground running.

Jeannie had a handful of photos on the Moxy Girl Instagram as a placeholder, but working full-time on other projects, she couldn’t focus on building the channel. With a good strategy in place, we could jump into writing compelling content and reaching new people.

Our content focused on telling a story by sharing our inspiring Moxy Girl blog posts, stories we found of empowered women, background on the Moxy Girl brand and products, and news about women’s issues. Each post had thoughtfully crafted hashtags and messaging.

We went from posts like this:

To posts like this:

Adjust as Needed

One of the beautiful things about social media is how easily you can manage and monitor your success.

At any point in our work together, we could shift the content, the hashtags, the overall strategy, the platform itself, etc. to better align with Moxy Girl’s needs and goals. After three months of Instagram management, we developed two additional content types. We refined our use of hashtags, made plans to gather additional images, and assessed how social media was contributing to sales.

When I work with social media for a client, we start out with a specific scope of work, but we often change things as we go to fit their needs.

At three months into managing the Instagram account, Moxy Girl is seeing good growth and engagement. We re-assess each month and change our plans as needed — and we always make sure we’re sticking to the mission that Moxy Girl was built around.

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About the author

Jessica Kennedy

Jessica builds websites and optimizes sites for SEO for small business owners who'd rather be outside. Learn more about Jessica.

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