Pantone Challenge: organic growth strategy for a niche Instagram account
Summary
Brief
Increase visibility and engagement for a nail polish influencer account on Instagram.
The client needed a creative and visually captivating solution to stand out in a saturated market, attract new followers, and build long-term community loyalty, all without relying on paid ads.
My contribution
I created a gamified weekly challenge using Pantone’s Color of the Year as a theme to leverage brand adjacency. Key contributions included:
- Concept & Strategy: Developed creative prompts and visually striking mood boards.
- Community Engagement: Implemented user-generated content and social proof tactics.
- Execution: Managed content scheduling to reinforce habitual engagement.
- Recognition: Showcased participant content in collages, enhancing peer validation and network effects.
The campaign significantly boosted organic reach, engagement, and brand presence.
Year
2018
Client
The Nail Polish Hoarder
Milan, Italy
Services
- Social Media Strategy
- Community Engagement
- Content Creation
- Visual Design (Mood boards, Instagram collages)
- Digital Marketing & Growth Tactics
THE PROCESS - STEP 1
Exploring the niche and community
One of the very first challenges I encountered was the identification of the key players in the nail polish community: there were already a few big names who were evidently operating in a business-like capacity, and many others who simply enjoyed sharing a space with fellow nail polish enthusiasts. Given the over-saturation of the niche, it became apparent quite early that relying on standard tactics (image quality, sporadic collaborations, participation in challenges) could only bring limited growth and visibility.Â
I needed a strategy rooted in differentiation and designed to maximize platform-specific engagement mechanics, including visual storytelling and social proof.
My competitive analysis and market research also revealed the following:Â
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DYNAMICS
Successful influencers relied heavily on peer recognition and user-generated content (UGC) to create a feedback loop of interaction and visibility.
PLATFORM ALGORITHM OPTIMIZATION
Instagram rewarded high-quality, curated visuals, making content aesthetics a critical factor for growth and discoverability.
UNSTRUCTURED ATTEMPTS AT GAMIFICATION
There were already several attempts at leveraging UGC through “challenges”, but these were either sporadic, or generally very small in scope. However, even in this flawed form, they managed to raise quite a lot of interest from the audience.
Armed with these insights, I set out to create a campaign that fused gamification with content-driven engagement in a structured set-up that could put front and center the core passion of this community: color.
THE PROCESS - STEP 2
Concept development
The concept for the project was based on creating a visually captivating, recurring weekly challenge to foster community participation, with a strong focus on color. Nail polish is all about color, and there is hardly a bigger authority on color than PANTONE. So, to ensure relevance and visual harmony, I decided to anchor the challenge around Pantone’s Color of the Year, and call it the PANTONE CHALLENGE. It featured three core components:
A mood-board prompt: A prompt featuring a beautifully curated mood board filled with jewels, landscapes, fashion, and architecture—all in the same hue of the Pantone Color of the Year.
User Participation: Followers would be encouraged to publish nail polish swatches that would most closely resemble the prompt color, and post them using a challenge hashtags: #ITPantoneChallenge and #ITPantone2018.
Community Recognition: All submissions would be compiled into a collage and posted on the client’s account, where contributors were tagged and celebrated, thus reinforcing the positive feedback loop.
Visual design
Tools
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
Behind the scenes
The entire point of this image was that it needed to be breathtakingly beautiful. Or rather, scroll-stoppingly beautiful. I took inspiration from Pinterest mood boards for this piece, and used a carefully selected set of subjects to convey a sensation of refined sophistication.
Ideally, the hero image illustrates the color name. The precise hexadecimal of the featured color was used as the image frame, and color adjustment was performed in order to uniform the hue to the original sample as much as possible.
THE PROCESS - STEP 3
Proof of concept
The first prompt, based on Pantone’s Color of the Year, Ultraviolet, was an immediate success. Engagement soared as participants enthusiastically submitted designs, interacted with each other, and shared the challenge posts. Key factors driving engagement included:
- Social Proof: Followers saw their work featured on the client’s account, which motivated them to share the posts with their own networks.
- Peer Recognition: Participants valued being tagged and recognized within a creative community.
On the back of this success, it was time to expand the challenge to include the full range of Pantone Spring/Summer colors for 2018, pulling from both the New York and the London palettes.
THE PROCESS - STEP 4
Full launch
With the proof of concept validated, I officially launched the full challenge, expanding to cover 20 Pantone colors over several months. Each week followed the established process:
- Prompt Creation: I designed a visually striking mood board showcasing the week’s Pantone color through inspiring elements.
- Challenge Announcement: The prompt was posted on Instagram every Sunday.
- Participation and Engagement: Followers created their own interpretations, tagged the client, and used the challenge hashtag.
- Community Showcases: I compiled the submissions into collages, tagging each contributor to celebrate their creativity and expand the reach of the challenge.
This approach fostered ongoing engagement and positioned the account as a creative leader within the nail polish influencer space.
Quantitative and qualitative results
The results demonstrated both quantitative growth and qualitative impact on the account’s presence and reputation:
Quantitative Results:
- Significant increase in follower count over the duration of the challenge.
- Consistent engagement rates across posts, with high levels of likes, comments, and shares.
Qualitative Impact:
- Enhanced brand affinity and community loyalty. Participants frequently returned to take part in multiple challenges.
- Elevated status within the niche as a curator of creative content.
- Increased network visibility as participants’ networks engaged with the challenge content through shares and tags.
These outcomes reflect the success of the strategy, which effectively combined visual storytelling, community engagement, and content gamification to drive both visibility and loyalty on Instagram.
Vanity metrics
Followers
+
0
%
Likes / post
+
0
%
Comments / post
+
0
%