Why Strava?

As a company full of athletes, ROKA was already quite familiar with the Strava experience and what it offers athletes. ROKA felt that Strava enables them to target their ideal demographic: athletes who push their limits, enjoy a variety of different activities, and seek improvement. Additionally, given Strava’s prominence within the endurance sport community and among the wider athlete community, aligning with Strava made a lot of sense, as it provided ROKA with a unique opportunity to reach the right people at the right time at the right place.

Recent Strava Challenges

Even though ROKA has had a long-running presence on Strava, their challenges still continue to attract many new participants. In honor of the 2021 editions of the grueling one-day races taking place in April, ROKA launched the Monuments challenge, calling on Strava athletes to ride 100 kilometers over two weeks for a $30 voucher. Athletes who rode 400 kilometers (100km for each monument) would get a chance to win 1 of 4 pairs of the custom Matador sunglasses that World Champion Anna van der Breggen raced in at the first-ever Paris-Roubaix Femmes. Over the course of two weeks in early April of 2021, 130,302 participants logged 1.4 million hours of activity, and 20,883 of those athletes were first time ROKA challenge participants. ROKA likes to get creative with their Strava challenges, as seen by the ROKA N+1 challenge, which they ran in conjunction with Specialized Bicycles. In this challenge, they asked Strava athletes the following question: "What's the correct number of bikes to own?"

Of course, the answer was “The number you have, plus one, of course!”

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How Do They Promote Challenges Outside of Strava?

In order to drive greater participation in the Strava challenge, ROKA promotes their challenges across multiple social media and marketing channels. They send out emails to customers subscribed to their various email lists, and on Instagram, they try to come up with creative and engaging content related to the challenges. They create giphys for their challenge badges and frequently post challenge-related content on their Instagram stories. Additionally, ROKA promotes their sponsored challenges within their Strava club of 130.3K members. To help challenges go viral, ROKA tries to drive challenge joins, since anytime a Strava user joins a challenge, all of their followers can see that the user in question has joined a challenge. Driving community engagement through challenge helps increase the reach and engagement, and this community activation is the key to success. Strava athletes love challenges, metaphorically and literally. ROKA receives a lot of great feedback regarding their challenges and has seen a lot of user engagement within their Strava clubs as a result. 

What Keeps Bringing Them Back to Strava?‍

ROKA runs sponsored challenges nearly every month. Sponsored challenges continue to be quite successful for them, benefitting ROKA from both a brand awareness and an e-commerce standpoint. ROKA has seen a lot of new customers arriving from Strava challenges, as well as increased brand recognition within the both endurance sports community and the wider athlete community. Strava sponsored challenges not only empower ROKA to just “help” athletes, but to “speak” to them.