When we talk about European tech, it’s easy to think of well-established hubs such as Amsterdam, London, or Berlin — but make no mistake: innovation is happening in all corners of the continent.

As a Spaniard living in London, I’m constantly hyping up what my great country has to offer, and the caliber of talent that comes out of its universities — and let me tell you, neighboring Portugal has nothing to envy Spain.

Spain’s and Portugal’s tech ecosystems have grown significantly over the past decade, and even though their scenes are still nascent, they shouldn’t be overlooked or underestimated.

For example, ridesharing company Cabify was founded in Spain and has raised a staggering $477 million to date from well-known investors including Rakuten Capital. The company, which is a tech unicorn, currently operates in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.

Fellow unicorn Glovo was founded in Barcelona in 2015. The company offers an on-demand courier service that buys, picks up, and delivers items ordered through its smartphone app.

Over in Portugal, Lisbon-born OutSystems joined the tech unicorn club in 2018. Several months later it was joined by Talkdesk , a provider of cloud-based contact center software, which although founded in Portugal in 2011 is now headquartered in San Francisco.

Spanish and Portuguese companies are making waves, so what needs to happen in order for everyone to appreciate the ecosystems as much as I do?

Growing in the Iberian Peninsula

Aside from the obvious attraction — excellent quality of life, good weather all year round, and delicious food (!) — there are many reasons why the Iberian Peninsula is open for business.

Ok yes, I’ll be the first to admit that scaling a tech company in Portugal and Spain comes with its own set of unique challenges. However, there are also opportunities for entrepreneurs seeking to build businesses and investors looking to grow their portfolios — often by snapping up companies at much cheaper valuations.

Talent is technically as good as elsewhere and it’s often cheaper, says Adao Oliveiro, an investment manager at Portugal Ventures , a venture capital firm with €450 million in assets under management. “But we need to be better at pitching ourselves,” he adds.

Cool, Spanish and Portuguese entrepreneurs need to blow their own trumpet more? No worries, they can take lessons from me!

Get confident, get money

Javier Mateo, deputy director of entrepreneurship at València Activa — Valencia’s network of innovative entrepreneurs launched by the city’s council — agrees, noting how Spain needs to overcome somewhat of an inferiority complex with regards to its European counterparts.

Both countries, Mateo and Oliveiro agree, need to get better at showing off their qualities. There’s also room for improvement when it comes to access to capital, particularly beyond Series A, but this hasn’t stopped Spain or Portugal birthing tech unicorns. One can only help but wonder what the region could produce with even more funding.

This only scratches the surface, though. I’ll dig deeper with Mateo and Oliveiro — along with JC Taunay-Bucalo, TravelPerk’s chief commercial officer — on how to scale businesses in Spain and Portugal and what the region needs to do to get more noticed at TNW2020 next month.

Secure your free ticket to TNW2020 now!

‘Tangential’ content is the link building tactic your brand is missing out on

Branded content is crucial for many reasons: communicating the value of your product/service, helping people make buying decisions, providing pertinent information to your primary audience, and more.

But if your marketing goals include earning high-quality backlinks, building your brand awareness, and increasing your organic traffic, tangential content needs to be in your content strategy.

So what exactly is it, and how can you incorporate it into your own content calendar?

Defining tangential content

Tangential content is content that is related to a brand’s industry but is not related to its core branding. It doesn’t refer to a product or service offering, nor is it a bottom-of-the-funnel effort to convert.

In the spirit of showing and not telling, here is the difference between content that’s more tangential vs. content that is more topical.

On the top, you see a tangential piece of content by Hershey that provides tips to families on how to be safe when trick-or-treating in 2020. Does this have to do specifically with buying candy? No. But does it provide value to their target audience, candy fans? Yes.

Below that, you’ll see something a little more topical: a recipe that includes a Hershey’s product . Even this piece has a touch of tangential in that it isn’t directly about purchasing the candy, but the candy is necessary for the activity, putting it more on the tangential, product-related side.

Who’s using tangential content

My team and I were wondering the same thing, as we’re huge advocates of the strategy and have been using it for our clients for years.

So we decided to look into it. We examined the content of all the brands nominated for the 2020 Content Marketing Awards and found a majority of those companies use tangential content on their blog.

That’s a large number of quality content marketing programs using tangential content on their blogs!

But it’s not just blog content. 31.3% of the brands we analyzed also had tangential off-site content, meaning content they used to acquire earned media. This is what we do at Fractl, and I’ll be showing an example later in the post.

This is why I’m so surprised tangential content isn’t talked about more, and frankly, I think nearly all brands should be giving it a shot because of the advantages it brings.

How you can benefit

Tangential content is powerful for a few reasons.

First, it unlocks a new, broader audience, who becomes aware of your brand and enters the top of your funnel.

Second, since it’s not as salesy, it can help you build backlinks to your site, which builds the authority of your brand and improves the standing of your site in Google’s eyes.

And third, though a bit more nebulously, having to come up with tangential content ideas prompts you to zoom out a bit and explore other issues and interests your audience has, leading to more robust audience personas.

Let’s look at some real examples of how these benefits come into play.

A great example of on-site content is Canva’s Color wheel , which helps you determine which colors go well together.

I’m assuming Canva wanted to broadly target people interested in design elements, as they offer a design tool.

This makes this strategy really smart, because they created a useful calculator people probably bookmark, share, and link to. (In fact, this page earned more than 4,000 engagements on Facebook, according to BuzzSumo .) And even though it doesn’t relate directly to signing up for Canva, it still appeals to the broader audience they’re interested in connecting with.

Another example is a project we did for Hire A Helper, a company that assists users in finding movers. We didn’t do a project about moving; instead, we surveyed 1,000 people on how they interact with their housemates to unearth new insights about quality time.

Here’s one of the graphics we created based on our analysis of the results.

Because this content is not only relevant to people moving but anyone who’s lived with someone else, it’s much more widely appealing, which is something publishers look for, too. Oftentimes they want what they write about to be significant for a majority of their readers.

We pitched this content to writers and earned coverage on Better Homes & Gardens , which syndicated to Allrecipes and Yahoo!

Without this new, tangential data, it would have been much more difficult for Hire A Helper to reach these large publication audiences and get the SEO benefit of earning high-authority backlinks.

Creating/improving your own tangential content

For tangential content to be worth the effort, it needs to appeal to a larger audience than you normally target, or at least a new audience that’s still somewhat related to your industry.

This requires a new perspective throughout your entire content process.

Here’s how I recommend tackling tangential content:

Expand your keyword research — Use a tool like Keyword Surfer and get lost in related searches. Explore what related topics people are interested in that you might have stayed away from since they don’t tie to your core branding.

Get inspiration from other industries — Competitive research is crucial, but our team has found that if you get stuck only looking at other brands in your own industry, you won’t find the creative inspiration you need to think outside the box, which is required to come up with great tangential content ideas.

Think laterally — When you have a list of subtopics related to your core brand, ask yourself: what else is relevant to this topic? For example, if you’re a car insurance brand, what else is related to driving? Work commutes, singing in the car, safety, family vacations… the list goes on and on.

Conclusion

My suggestion isn’t to throw away your topical content and make everything more general. But I do think all content marketers should take time to see if tangential content will help them achieve goals they haven’t been able to reach through topical content alone.

As long as you’re still providing value to your audiences and creating engaging, accurate, and new tangential content experiences, there’s a good chance it’ll boost your brand awareness and traffic.

Technology start-ups that fail fast succeed faster

Failure rates of new technology-based companies are shockingly high. It is estimated that 75% of technology start-ups do not generate profits . Other data suggest upwards of 90% of new technology enterprises completely fail.

However, some failures of products or technologies have been positive and lead to success. It took Thomas Edison thousands of attempts before he succeeded with his lightbulb design. Although learning from failure has been described as critical to the success of technology-based start-ups , there is little existing research that supports this claim.

Strategic management scholars have described and found support for a number of organizational philosophies , behaviors , and strategies that promote business success.

However, little attention has been paid to empirically validate the strategies that pertain to learning from failure in technology-intensive industries.

My interest in this topic came from working as a manager for a global biotechnology company. When creating novel innovations, their organizational mantra was simple: fail fast to succeed faster. After joining the faculty of Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan , I wanted to explore if other technology-based start-ups employed this failure learning strategy and how it influenced their performance. This topic is an ongoing area of my research and relates to the technology commercialization and venture development courses I teach.

Failure can produce success

In my article published in the Journal of High Technology Management Research , I explored commonalities of 120 leading Canadian technology start-ups . I found that those with organizational commitments to learning from failure realized greater scientific output, raised more capital, filed more new patents, developed novel innovations, and achieved greater scientific milestones as compared to other start-ups.

Specifically, firms with what I called a “failure learning orientation” encouraged employees to openly discuss failures, sought to understand why the failure occurred as opposed to who was responsible, prioritized learning from the failure over any other activity, and strategized how to move forward after failure. The relationship between failure learning orientation and how well a company performed suggested that this strategy could be viable for technology-based start-ups.

Discovering desires, creating collaborations

Another commonality of leading firms pertained to their capacity to understand the desires of customers in their respective markets. Not surprisingly, how they understood customers and competitors was found to be an important determinant of success.

However, it was not as critical to the early stages of technology development as failure learning orientation or the ability to secure partnerships with other firms. These partnerships were described as non-competitive strategic alliances aimed at achieving mutually beneficial goals. For example, performance was positively impacted if a firm that had a great product but lacked marketing expertise was successful in finding a partner that could assist with product promotion.

The combination that yielded the greatest performance effect was employing a learning from failure strategy and effectively searching, managing, and coordinating complementary strategic alliances.

Positive strategies

These findings have significant implications for executives and managers of technology-based start-ups as they offer strategies to improve performance in highly competitive industries. The study confirms the importance of previously established strategies such as market knowledge management.

More importantly, the study showed that strategic alliance management and learning from failure may be viable strategies for technology ventures. Most notably, the study offers a new perspective that celebrates failures.

Businesses may wish to emphasize the positive outcomes from failures such as learning rather than blame, as it pays to do so. It is this supportive culture that fosters innovation driven by learning from past steps that are common to the leading Canadian technology-based new ventures.

This article is republished from The Conversation by Grant Alexander Wilson , Department of Management & Marketing, Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .