Making Strava’s Storytelling More Discoverable
How the Brand’s Great Stories Could Be Better Heard
Objective
Identify possibilities to incorporate Strava’s rich story telling into the everyday user experience.
Background
Strava does an excellent job and puts quite a bit of investment into creating content around product updates, stories, training tips, and more. Every time I come across something produced by Strava, I’m better off for having read it. There are multiple places Strava’s content lives, with the primary places being their blog and another page named Stories. Blog entries seem to be more text heavy and the Stories recount an experience with limited text and emphasis on photos.
In my opinion, Strava is producing some of the best content there is on endurance sport culture. Aside from Tracksmith, I am unaware of anyone that is getting to the core of what it means to be a cyclist or a runner in the way they are. One specific story that recently was passed along to me was Cross Country Big City — A Week in the Life of the Columbia University Cross Country Team, which told the story of a week inside Columbia’s cross country team through the perfect combination of photos, pictures, and sport specific humor. After viewing the story, I started browsing other recent stories and spent some time catching up. Doing so, I couldn’t help but ask, “How have I not been reading every one of these posts?”
Product Suggestion
Although I feel the stories are first-rate, I am not sure I would have ever read the Columbia story if someone hadn’t passed it along to me, despite my several daily visits to the Strava ecosystem. The separation of the blog and stories from the core product is somewhat confusing, but there is a clear route to increasing consumption of the published content. Strava is producing remarkable stories and making important product updates, and placing the content within in a user’s activity feed would be welcomed by athletes and increase investment in the product.
If Strava content was tastefully placed within a user’s activity feed there would be increased consumption. Giving users the option to hide the posts would also provide important testing metrics to see if placing the content within the feed did provide value. Because the content is already categorized by Community, Product, Pros, etc., you could also give users the option to select which information they would like to see if their feed.
Conclusion
Pushing the content into the activity feed of users is an important step for Strava to take to maximize the exposure of their content and increase the perception of Strava being embedded within the sport community. Instead of users frequently checking for just updated activities, they could be pointed towards new content. Multiple times, I have experienced regret for not seeing something Strava put out sooner. However, because I do visit the site so frequently, there is no reason this should be the case.
The content it top-notch and deserves to be seen. Strava could easily gain increased exposure of their content while increasing the drive to use the product and deepen their brand image. All of this could be done by strategic content placement in the activity feed. Important user data could also be collected by monitoring the way users interacted with the experience, potentially guiding future storytelling efforts. With limited downside, this is a change I look forward to Strava implementing sooner than later.
