Content marketing is becoming as much a sales tool as a brand-building one, according to Cameron Upshall, the head of the newly-opened Melbourne office of the agency, King Content.

A Sydney-based content marketing agency, King Content opened a Melbourne office a few weeks ago, (although contact details for it are a little hard to find – the contact is still a Sydney number).

Upshall is its commercial director, and Charles Jacobson is technology director. Both are former executives of a marketing software company, Exact Target, which was recently bought by Salesforce.com.

Referring to new research from the Content Marketing Institute, an American peak body for the sector, Upshall says: “The way we are measuring content marketing is moving from traditional brand awareness and thought leadership to metrics around revenue, lead generation and sales effectiveness.”

Working from an office on St Kilda Road, near Melbourne’s CBD, Upshall and Jacobson are busy hiring editors – two initially, he says – to meet demand for content marketing services in Melbourne. “The uptake from the Melbourne market has been phenomenal,” he says. “We have only been here a couple of weeks, and the interest and vibe has been good.”

Content marketing is still immature in Australian, Upshall says, and it is the size of the opportunity that attracted him to the role. However, momentum is building.

“It was a buzzword a few years ago, but now with access to all the information consumers have online, and the buyer’s journey now completed online, if you are not controlling the content associated with your brand, you are not in the game,” he says.

He says content and technology are starting to converge. “To produce really engaging content at scale, you need automation tools and technology in place to measure effectiveness.”

But the biggest barrier remains producing engaging content. “Marketers don’t have time to get that content out, or produce enough of it. And the audience can be so varied. The tone and structure can be challenging.”

Clients first meet with content strategists to get a content marketing strategy in place, and then an in-house editor works to execute that plan. “The content is created by an outsource model,” Upshall says. “We have 1500 different contributors on our books, across every topic and industry you can imagine. That is really our competitive advantage. Journalists are leaving publishers and broadcasters and moving into companies like ours that help brands become publishers.

“That is what we do.”