How Marketing Leaders Use Strava

On top of presenting new Strava product updates, our annual Camp Strava event brings together global brands, thought leaders and content creators that have movement as their core mission and are experts in their field. This year, we hosted a panel chat with marketing leaders from top fitness and nutrition brands to discuss the topic of ‘Strava Brands - Driving Community Engagement and ROI’ and how Strava helps their businesses succeed. 

This powerhouse of panelists included Melanie Allen [SVP and CMO, Brooks Running], Celeste Lorenzo [VP Marketing, The Feed] and Stephanie Perdue [VP Brand Marketing, Chipotle]. 

We thought we’d highlight the key takeaways from this discussion to help marketers understand how leaders in the field think – and use – Strava as a platform to grow their brand. 

Brand ambassadors can be instrumental in brands’ marketing strategies. They’re advocates for brands, endorse products and can inspire their – and a brand’s – followers and users to focus on specific campaigns. Strava has over 125M active users, so it’s a great platform for brands’ ambassadors to engage the community and drive awareness to their brand. They can achieve this by regularly logging their activities, taking part in brands’ sponsored challenges and posting in brands’ Strava clubs.

At the Camp Strava chat, Celeste Lorenzo at The Feed said that “We sponsor 90 world class athletes who are great brand ambassadors and community leaders. When we can tap into these experts and they can tell their story on the Strava platform in an uncluttered way for anyone who’s part of our Strava Club to hear, it’s a great value exchange for Strava users and our athletes to divulge their expertise in their sport.” 

Melanie Allen from Brooks chipped in by giving the example of one of their brand athletes, CJ Albertson, who answered any question asked by their Strava club members via their club posts. “We saw loads of community engagement with so many people asking CJ very specific questions, and our club’s growth saw huge numbers.” Unlocking brand athletes can supercharge brands’ presences by adding value on the platform and bringing Strava users to them.

First things first – what are Strava sponsored challenges? These are unique promotional tools for brands that bring active people, or people wanting to become more active, together in a way that adds value to the participants and is a great promotion for brands.

They’re a fantastic way to reach new audiences, like what Brooks experienced with their monthly 5K sponsored challenges. Brooks did something unprecedented in Strava’s history and became the first brand to ever host a global monthly sponsored challenge, the Brooks 5K Challenge.

“Sponsoring the 5K Challenge led to explosive club growth and skyrocketed our numbers,” Melanie shared at Camp Strava. Over a million people worldwide participated in the challenge. It primarily targeted new runners, a group often overlooked by traditional running brands, which helped broaden Brooks' customer base and shifted perceptions that their shoes were exclusively for serious runners. “It changed their idea that Brooks shoes may not be for them,” she added, highlighting how these challenges can create engaging content and foster brand loyalty.

These challenges also reach established audiences that brands want to provide extra value to and want to nurture. For The Feed, Celeste explained that “Strava challenges enabled them to create traceable, impactful campaigns,” – We’ll get to that in more detail in a moment – “Strava gave us the opportunity to message and connect with a huge group of athletes that truly could benefit from the products we sell,” she continued.

As for Chipotle, Stephanie explained they wanted to engage the health and wellness community even further through sponsored challenges. One standout campaign of theirs was a segment challenge across six key markets, where participants who ran that segment the most could earn free Chipotle for a year. “We were blown away with the results,” she remarked, “we had people log over nine million miles and engagement built every week.”

Stephanie also shared that Chipotle launched “No Quitters Day” - a challenge that required participants to log weekly movement on Strava. This challenge attracted over 180,000 participants in less than three weeks, garnering loads of new customer acquisition. “Partnering with Strava isn’t just a ‘pay for play’ ad,” she explained, “we figured out together how to engage our loyalty members and runners in the community, which unlocked a lot of creativity within this partnership.”

Measuring marketing activity is a perennial problem for marketers across every industry and function. Our panel leaders had much to say on the topic, focusing on how they do this from a Strava perspective: 

Melanie from Brooks said: “One of the easiest ways for us to measure our success on Strava is by looking at our club growth, as well as active and new engagement within the club, we also look at the demographics we’re going after.”

“Brooks tends to lean a little bit more female in its customer base, so capturing the male athlete is important to us,” she continued. “In our 5K challenges we were shocked to see 61% were male athletes. We’ve been trying to crack that code for a long time, so to be able to see some of those metrics gives us an indication that we’re headed in the right direction.”

As for The Feed, which measures success in a more down funnel and performance-based system, Celeste said their sponsored challenges are what did the trick and enabled them to create traceable, impactful campaigns. “What’s really great about Strava is that I can really track the return,” she mentioned. 

By offering athletes credits towards their first ‘The Feed’ purchase upon completing their Strava challenge, The Feed engaged with new customers and very easily measured the direct success of their campaigns, as that’s “a very traceable attribution”.

This clear attribution was key in proving the tangible benefits of their Strava partnership. “My main goal is new customer acquisition.” The Feed get the hard metric of the return through the purchase but “I also have the return of profiling a whole new customer that came in through our Strava challenges.”

Chipotle could also easily track their metrics through their sponsored challenges, as Stephanie said of one of their challenges: “We had people log over nine million miles and engagement built every week that my Chipotle team could easily track and watch. The engagement was off the charts.” 

As for their ‘No Quitter’s Day Challenge,’ Stephanie shared that “it attracted over 180,000 participants in less than three weeks,” attracting a significant number of new customers that was easily traceable through Strava.