Meet Grant Lingel, CEO Neil Patel Latin America

All the way from Brazil we’re welcoming the CEO of Neil Patel Latin America – Grant Lingel. We took the chance to get to know him a bit better in this interview!

My first question to you is, could you tell me a bit more about what you do at work? What is the highlight of your working day and what kind of projects excites you the most?

My main focus as CEO of Neil Patel Latin America is business/relationship development. This entails extensive networking and negotiating new projects. The projects that excite me the most are when companies from outside of Brazil decide to enter the Brazilian market. We have a very strong success rate with localizing foreign company sites to the Brazilian market and ranking them to drive qualified, organic traffic on Google.  

When and why did you decide to start working in digital marketing?

I published a book in 2009 and knew the publisher was going to do very little to help promote it. Since the book was about traveling and backpacking, I started an outreach campaign and contacted about a hundred travel blogs (when travel blogging just started to take off). I was able to get a lot of press, stories, interviews, etc. about the book and realized the power of digital marketing. 

What do you think is the most important thing for new businesses to start off with when it comes to digital marketing?

I think the thing that most small businesses need to have a better understanding of who they are hoping to target and who they are going to be competing against. Most new businesses don’t truly understand their audience and their competition. This makes it nearly impossible to create the right digital strategies that will provide the best results. 

How do you keep up to speed on everything that is happening in digital?

I read a lot. That helps me stay up to date. However, the thing that helps me the most is by surrounding myself with some of the best digital marketing professionals in the world. I speak to Neil pretty much every single day. And the team we have built in Brazil and Latin America is comprised of some of the most talented digital professionals I have ever seen. Getting to work with them on a daily basis makes it hard to fall behind 🙂

At October 9 we will see you speaking at SearchStars, what can the audience expect from your speech?

I am going to talk about the importance of global branding and growth. I will discuss my experience with Neil and what we are doing for other companies that are looking to localize to new markets. Too many companies try and focus on only market and miss out on the opportunity to potentially dominate a new market that needs them more than anything else. It’s very possible that a SaaS company in Sweden, for example, has a solution that helps a lot of Swedish companies… but what that company might not realize is that their solution could be needed even more in Brazil. Considering Sweden has 10 million people and Brazil has 210 million, the chances of succeeding in Brazil could bring some amazing results for that company.

Haven’t had the time to get your ticket yet? There are only a few left at early bird price!