Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 21.06.2024 
At Propellernet, we’re a digital marketing agency based in Brighton, working across the key disciplines of paid media, technical SEO and digital PR, and have been driving results for our clients for years. One of those clients is the market-leading gym chain PureGym, who we’ve now been working with for over five years, and while our fitness-focused PR work with PureGym has always been strong, we’ve made some big gains in the last couple of years in particular, thanks to the launch of the UK Fitness Report. A report that has now been nominated for a UK Digital PR Award in the Best Use of Content in a Digital PR Campaign category.
We’re so excited for the work to be recognised, and wanted to delve a bit deeper into why this deserves the win come July 10th…
How did the UK Fitness Report come about?
With close to 400 gyms across the UK, it’s safe to say that PureGym is a true authority in the health and fitness space, and with thousands of personal trainers on their books, alongside amazing partners like the British Heart Foundation – they know their stuff. At the same time, health, wellbeing and exercise are subjects that requires advice, and leave a lot of people turning to Google to ask questions: ‘when are gyms busiest’ – ‘how long do people spend at the gym’ – ‘how often do people exercise’ – ‘how to overcome gymtimidation’. These questions and more are all regularly asked by people looking for advice, or simply searching for a stat to reference in their own content, so we thought: could we create something that answers them all in one place?
Enter the UK Fitness Report. Launched first in November 2022 and now an annual fixture for PureGym, we used this search analysis to create an in-depth report brimming with stats and useful insights, along with genuinely useful advice based around everything from overcoming the fear of the free weights section, to getting started on a fitness journey. Created using data from Google, YouGov, independent surveys and crucially, PureGym’s own internal data, this enabled us to serve both purposes of creating something that would become a useful resource for anyone looking to reference a trustworthy stat, or feel a bit more comfortable when exercising…
Creating content that can gain links without any outreach
The aims of creating some genuinely useful content that would be used by the audience, as well as across PureGym’s marketing channels were paramount, but within this was the digital PR goal of creating something that would gain evergreen backlinks from relevant, authoritative websites and in turn, boost the visibility of key commercial pages.
But first, we needed to get the report seen by journalists, and also boost its own visibility in search, so that people could easily find it when looking for a stat/insight to reference, versus other competing pages.
To do this, we made sure to include a highly media friendly aspect to the report: the emerging fitness trends set to dominate gyms and exercise plans for the upcoming year. Having previously created content around this topic with PureGym, we knew there was media interest around this and in the context of a year-end fitness report, what better way to round things off? Very quickly, this fitness trends takeaway of the report began to gain coverage and links from top tier media around the world, be it The Sun and The Independent, or GQ Italy and Forbes India.
As a result, the report began to rank extremely well for terms associated with ‘gym statistics’, ‘fitness stats’ etc. and before long, reached the golden chalice for any piece of digital PR content: it was gaining high levels of links without any outreach whatsoever. Proving what we originally thought would be the case, the report became a place for journalists and even other brands to use when backing up their own stories – be it a simple reference about the number of gym members in the UK, or a wider piece about the enduring popularity of Pilates. The report organically gained links from the likes of ALDI, Vitality, UK Active and more – all places we would otherwise have little chance of gaining a link from.
Why is the UK Fitness Report a worthy winner?
As mentioned earlier, the goal from a search perspective wasn’t just to create a new page that ranked well for terms associated to fitness related stats, but for it to have an impact on the visibility of key commercial pages. With the report internally linking through to many of these priority pages, the result was exactly that: positive growth in search engine results, across a host of target pages. Showing the worth in taking the time to analyse what your audience (including journalists) are interested in, and creating something that goes much further than the competition.
Following the success of the first iteration of this report, it has since been rolled out for a second year, and has given ourselves and PureGym the platform to keep building on what is now an industry-recognised release, with new insights, new expert commentary and more opportunity for PureGym’s marketing channels: be it further media friendly aspect of the report, or elements that can be used across social and email.
We’re excited to see what’s next for the report – hopefully first, it’ll be a Digital PR Award!
