Amplifying your challenge

Preparing to run a challenge

Strava Sponsored Challenges can be an incredibly effective promotional tool. But to truly make the most of them, brand partners need to think about how best to construct and execute in several key areas.

Talent

Consider a celebrity ambassador, influencer or pro athlete with reach and appeal to curate or front the challenge for you - peaking interest to the masses and their followers

Incentive

A strong reward e.g. early product drop, discount or charity connection can produce significant interest and engagement ‍

Products

Have you got a new product/colourway to launch? Why not drop it for your challenge completers first? 

Promotion

Create plans to promote your challenge on and off Strava, ideally combining channels for maximum reach and participation.‍

How Strava promotes challenges

Strava has effective mechanisms to make challenges highly discoverable by users.

Challenges can be found and joined through the Challenge Gallery.

‍And as athletes work toward completing the challenge, they promote it to their followers directly in the main feed through Milestone and Achievement Callouts.

To maximise participation, you can choose to add extra promotion on Strava in the form of in-feed units and even custom emails. These can be targeted to athletes before, during or after a challenge, depending on the objective.‍

Off-Strava promotion

As well as established methods of promotion on the Strava platform, to make challenges go the extra mile, we encourage partners to also promote their challenges through other external channels.

This allows challenges to simultaneously reach Strava’s existing user base but also re-engage a partner’s audience. This approach maximizes potential reach, participation and ultimately ROI.

Influencer/Pro athlete

Influencers and creators are becoming increasingly important to driving social engagement online. Many leading professional and amateur athletes are on Strava, and combining their reach within the platform together with their other channels (including Instagram, TikTok and others) can provide a very large boost to challenge participation.

High value athletes can also be a very effective way to showcase relevant equipment and gear. Make sure they join your challenge, triggering in-feed notifications to all their followers, but also tag relevant gear in their activity. This is equally important for growing your Club. Highly visible creators and athletes joining a club will also create notifications for their followers to do the same.

Out of home

Contextually relevant placements can supercharge joins. We've seen some superb examples of this, including from The North Face and Samsung UK. Both emphasize the potential for hyper-local targeting, celebrating the achievements of real active people on Strava.

Press

Consider pitching the challenge to relevant media outlets. The format of Strava challenges makes them eye catching and unusual, but combined with a creative angle – particularly framed around a social issue – is a great way to try and secure relevant press coverage.

Email

A simple but important tip – remember to communicate to your existing database to maximise participation.

Website

Create web pages, popups and banners to encourage participation (and for claiming rewards).

Social

Whether paid or organic, supercharge your reach with a combination of channels to maximise your participation