The Ultimate Guide to Sponsored Challenges

What is a Strava Challenge?

Sponsored Challenges empower brands to craft activations that engage, excite, and drive long-term business outcomes.

Unlike traditional digital marketing campaigns, challenges are seamlessly integrated to the Strava experience and enhance the user experience. It’s a form of native advertising that genuinely benefits our users, rather than being yet another annoying ad to tap right past.

At its basic level, a Sponsored Challenge involves a brand incentivizing Strava athletes to take part in an activity – for example, walking 50km in a month – in return for a reward (in most cases, a discount, coupon or prize).

Which industries typically run challenges?

Sponsored Challenges are generally reserved for brands with a connection to sport, wellness, and nutrition (what we call  "endemic brands".) The reason for this restriction is to keep the user experience on Strava as non-interruptive and authentic as possible.

Below are some categories we've worked with. This list is, of course, only a very small sample of the brands and industries who have created Sponsored Challenges.

Broadly speaking, any brand with a genuine connection to an active lifestyle – either through their products, audience or campaigns – can run a challenge in principle.

Non-endemic brands

As well as the "core" industries above, we increasingly work with brands outside of these, but with a natural link to an active lifestyle. These includes brands like Tissot and Schneider Electric, who may sponsor races and athletic events and seek to position their brands as advancing sport and fitness.

The structure of Strava Challenge targeting

Gender

Gender targeting is useful if your product or service caters to a particular gender. For example, if you are a female activewear brand or a mens’ deodorant brand, it may be useful to target a specific gender.

Sport Type

In terms of sport type targeting, we enable brands to target runners, cyclists, multisport athletes, or a combination of those. 

How do we classify someone as a runner or cyclist?

If 80 percent or more of a user’s activities are runs, they are classified as a runner (likewise, for ‘cyclists’). Multisport athletes are those users who do not have one specific sport comprising 80 percent of their uploads.

We often see brands that cater to a specific sport include ‘multisport’ in their targeting along with their primary sport market in order to maximize their reach.

Geographic region

Whether you’re looking to run a global campaign, or just build awareness in a local market, we can help you reach the right audience. You can select as many countries as you would like to run a global campaign. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we can provide state and city-based targeting, although these would need to meet a minimum user threshold.

What Challenge types are available?

Challenges come in six different engaging formats: distance, duration, cumulative, elevation, streak, and segment challenges.

How can Challenges help me reach my goals?

Challenges are used by brands for one of two large-scale marketing goals, or a combination of the two:

1. Brand awareness: Aiming to reach an intended target audience to raise awareness of the brand, products and value proposition.

2. Performance marketing: Aiming to drive revenue (through e-commerce purchases) or conversions (through signups) at an effective cost per acquisition (CPA).

We find that brands are often surprised at how effective challenges can be at driving purchases. Remember, the Strava audience is extremely passionate about an active lifestyle, so if you offer a compelling reward, a great product, and a visible and motivating challenge, you can drive real value!

Match your challenge goal to your marketing objective

Your challenge construction should be related to the goal you have in mind, and of the audience you are trying to reach.

Brands looking to reach more casual athletes tend to set much lower goals in order to drive more completions.

On the other hand, brands whose customers tend to be committed athletes often set more lofty challenge goals - as they know their target audience is comprised of athletes likely to hit this goal.

Your marketing campaign needs to speak to the audience you are trying to reach, and a well-chosen challenge goal is a key part of that.

Whether your campaign’s goal is brand awareness, lead generation, or driving sales - athletes still need to complete your challenge to go through our challenge completion mechanic – resulting in a prompt to claim a reward on a partner brand's site.

It's therefore critical that you set the challenge goal accordingly. Make it too hard, and you risk missing out on valuable joins & completions - negatively impacting lead collection & reward redemption in turn.

Make it too easy, and you may not get the most effective results. 

Landing pages

When Strivers complete a challenge, they are prompted to visit a partner’s external page to claim their reward. 

It’s crucial that you create a well optimized page to help you achieve your conversion objectives (if applicable) from any challenge completions. 

This might include:

• Email signups

• Purchases

• Social follows

How much do Challenges cost?

Challenge pricing is based on three key factors: potential reach, season, and duration of the challenge. Challenges start at a minimum of around $30,000, though discounted rates exist for charities and other non-profits. 

Reach

The potential reach of your campaign is determined by your targeting factors - so geography, gender, and sport type. 

Seasonality

Seasonality plays a role in this as well. Challenges run in the spring and summer tend to be priced higher than late fall and winter ones.

Duration

You can run a challenge for one day all the way up to one month. The longer your challenge runs for, the higher it is priced.

Frequency

Brands that run sponsored challenges have 84 percent greater brand recognition on Strava than brands that do not, so investing in recurring sponsored challenges is crucial for maintaining brand awareness and loyalty. 

How is my challenge promoted?

We've covered some of the ways a Sponsored Challenge is promoted natively through Strava. But we find that combining our platform with other channels maximises results for brands.

Off-platform

Strava provides a huge potential audience, but combining our native platform promotion with your other channels and ambassadors can supercharge your results.

We’ve worked with clients to promote their challenges on other diverse channels including OOH, paid and organic social, and email.

Sponsored athletes

If you're a brand that directly sponsors athletes, when you host a challenge, make sure your brand ambassadors join! Their audience will see that they joined the challenge in their feed and be motivated to join them (using the network effect mechanisms we mentioned earlier).

Encourage your athletes to tie activities to sponsored challenges and share to other networks to drive incremental joins and value for your brand.

How do Strava clubs and challenges work together?

Combining your challenges, athlete ambassadors, and clubs is the most effective strategy for driving awareness on Strava.

This approach creates a virtuous circle for your brand and your engagement.

When you run a challenge, you’re not just achieving short-term campaign outcomes. You’re investing in a community that you can engage with — for the long haul.

With each successive challenge, you grow your Strava club audience substantially. Your Strava club is your brand’s home on Strava, that you can tap into forever and for free.

By engaging with your club, you are reactivating the community you’ve built and unlocking long-term growth and brand loyalty.

During Q4 2021, challenges on Strava helped to boost a number of clubs. Clubs running challenges have above average club member numbers, engagement, post interaction, weekly growth and posts per day.

For example, brands activating via Strava challenges witnessed 1.5x the level of weekly audience growth compared to brands that didn't.