By Chris Lee

Following the success of the search marketing conference series BrightonSEO, the organisers have expanded with a new spin-off conference, the Content Marketing Show in London on 20 November. Content marketing is, in effect, the use of engaging content – such as blog posts, infographics, video, podcasts, apps and tools – to generate inbound links, customer enquiries and interest, and – ultimately – sales conversions.

New Media Knowledge caught up with Kelvin Newman of search marketing agency SiteVisibility and the organiser of both events to learn more about the rising discipline of “content marketing” and why he feels there is a niche for a conference around the subject.

What was the inspiration for the Content Marketing Show?

Over the last couple of BrightonSEO events many of the most popular talks could be accurately described as content marketing. This is great news for those attending the event because it's a really important topic, but it's bigger than just SEO and unfortunately including these talks as part of a conference entitled BrightonSEO meant we were never going to be able to attract some of the attendees doing the most interesting content marketing.

So we decided; why don't we spin out a new event that has a real focus on content and invite an audience of SEOs, PR specialists, social media marketers, journalists and content strategists? If we can get all those people in one room and talking we'll have done what I've set out to achieve.

Who can attendees look forward to hearing from?

The line-up is still under wraps at the moment but the talks are falling into three major categories: in-house specialists sharing the secrets their successful projects, stories from business owners who've built whole businesses of the back of content marketing and agencies sharing practical tips on how you can make your campaigns more successful.

Where does “Content Marketing” fit into the wider marketing remit nowadays? Is this just SEO rebranded following Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates?

I'll admit there are plenty of people within the SEO space trying to re-brand themselves as content marketers, but if this event was just SEO people taking about SEO then it will have been a waste. What I actually want to achieve is to get together all these people from different backgrounds who are doing content marketing and get them to swap ideas, SEO people learning from PRs, social media marketers teaching bloggers and journalists new approaches etc.

What are your top tips for brands looking to improve their own - or start out on - content marketing campaigns?

The simplest place to start is asking your customers what they need to know before they make a purchase and if they struggled to find that information. Then you've got to work on putting that together in a compelling way that's useful and insightful. If you can get that process working then you are in a great place to build a great content marketing campaign. However, making it exceptionally good isn't easy!

Tickets for the Content Marketing Show go on sale at 09:30 on Monday 8 October 2012 at www.contentmarketingshow.com