Top 10 books for digital marketers
Books all marketing professionals should read.
Working as a Digital Marketer requires constantly improving your knowledge and be up to date with new strategies, methods, and tools that can help you get better insights to achieve your business goals.
Sometimes we have to do the hard work to gain more skills and perform better in our professional life and also be superior in our technique to others in this industry.
Below I have selected a list of 10 books that I found very useful for those who want to go the extra mile and do what is necessary to be a successful Digital Marketer.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
1. The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value
by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise
Book Description
What makes an effective and successful marketing leader?
The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, by former McKinsey partner Thomas Barta and senior London Business School professor Patrick Barwise, is the first research-based leadership book for marketers in the 21st century. Based on the largest ever research study of its kind, with detailed data on over 8,600 leaders in more than 170 countries, this game-changing book identifies 12 specific behaviors — or Powers — that drive marketers’ business impact and career success. Listening to it, you’ll learn how to:
- Mobilize your boss: Make an impact at the highest level and align marketing with the company’s priorities.
- Mobilize your colleagues: Inspire and motivate your nonmarketing colleagues to deliver a great customer experience.
- Mobilize your team: Build and align a winning marketing team.
- Mobilize yourself: Focus on goals that will benefit your customers, your company, and yourself by meeting your own needs and ambitions.
By zeroing in on the value creation zone (V-Zone) — the all-important overlap between your company’s and customers’ needs — you’ll be able to help the business win in the market — and achieve your career goals.
Warning: This is not a marketing book. It’s a leadership book for marketers, using the latest research on what works — and what doesn’t — in marketing’s digital age.
2. Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites
by Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson
Book Description
Many never make a profit. Others are successful at first, and then get crushed by competitors.
This book is about how to buck the trend — to make websites that customers love and that are outrageously profitable.
The methodology is based on the authors’ award-winning work growing many of the world’s biggest web companies — plus hundreds of smaller, market-leading companies in over eighty different industries. In this book, you’ll get
- What successful web businesses do differently (and others get wrong)
- How to easily identify your website’s biggest opportunities
- A treasure trove of proven solutions for growing businesses
Discover how to grow your profits — by making winning websites that people love.
3. #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness
by Gary Vaynerchuk
Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author draws from his popular show #AskGaryVee to offer surprising, often outrageous, and imminently useful and honest answers to everything you’ve ever wanted to know — and more — about navigating the new world.
Gary Vaynerchuk — the inspiring and unconventional entrepreneur who introduced us to the concept of crush it — knows how to get things done, have fun, and be massively successful. A marketing and business genius, Gary had the foresight to go beyond traditional methods and use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to reach an untapped audience that continues to grow.
#AskGaryVee showcases the most useful and interesting questions Gary has addressed on his popular show. Distilling and expanding on the podcast’s most urgent and evergreen themes, Gary presents practical, timely, and timeless advice on marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and everything else you’ve been afraid to ask but are dying to know. Gary gives you the insights and information you need on everything from effectively using Twitter to launching a small business, hiring superstars to creating a personal brand, launching products effectively to staying healthy — and even buying wine.
Whether you’re planning to start your own company, working in digital media, or have landed your first job in a traditional company, #AskGaryVeeis your essential guide to making things happen in a big way.
4. May I Have Your Attention, Please? Your Guide to Business Writing That Charms, Captivates and Converts
by Mish Slade
Book Description
Let’s not mince words here: most business writing is tedious, pompous and bereft of the tiniest sliver of personality.
It’s near impossible for customers to cut through the “innovative solutions” and “passion for customer service,” and find out who can actually give them what they need.
For the business owner who’s willing to do something different, though, it represents a major — and inexpensive — competitive advantage.
May I Have Your Attention, Please? lays out 12 simple principles that allow business owners — even those with no writing experience — to attract and enchant their dream customers. With clear and concise explanations of what works and why, and examples of the best and worst text out there, you’ll have all the tools you need to turn readers into buyers into raving fans.
Give your writing skills an instant upgrade
In this short book, you’ll learn:
- Simple techniques to turn your dull-as-dishwater business marketing into “can’t resist” copy — even if you don’t think of yourself as a “good writer.”
- How to make price irrelevant and be the only choice for your ideal customer — by changing nothing except your copywriting.
- The business writing “rules” you should revel in breaking.
- Why copying your competitors is a dangerous waste of time… and what to do instead (without spending hours searching for ideas).
- The easily avoidable mistakes that are turning your customers off — even if they don’t know it.
- A simple framework to help you blast through writer’s block and know exactly what to say in any piece of writing.
- How to “read your customers’ minds,” and get them looking for reasons to buy from you.
Who is this book for?
- Business owners looking to breathe more life into their website, content marketing or sales materials.
- Employees who want to gain a new skill and have more impact in their work.
- Anyone who has something great to offer — but is struggling to get the message across.
5. They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer
by Marcus Sheridan
Book Description
A revolutionary marketing strategy proven to drive sales and growth They Ask You Answer is a straightforward guide to fixing your current marketing strategy.
Regardless of your budget, you are almost certainly overspending on television, radio, and print ads, yet neglecting the number-one resource you have at your disposal: the Internet.
Content marketing is no longer about keyword-stuffing and link-building; in fact, using those tactics today gets your page shuffled to the bottom of the heap. Quality content is the key to success, and you already have the ingredients in-house. This book shows you how to structure an effective content strategy using the same proven principles that have revolutionized marketing for all types of businesses, across industries.
Author Marcus Sheridan’s pool company struggled after the housing collapse; today, they’re one of the largest pool installers in the U.S., turning away millions of dollars in business they simply cannot accommodate every year. How did he manage it? He answered questions.
This book shows you how Marcus’s strategy can work for your business, and how to use your keyboard to bring customers through the door. * Boost your company’s web presence with methods that work * Build a level of trust that generates customer evangelism * Leverage your in-house resources to produce winning content * Utilize tactics that work, regardless of industry or sector When people have questions, they ask a search engine.
If you have answers, the right content strategy will get them to the top of the search results and seen by millions of eyes every day. Drop the marketing-speak, stop “selling,” and start answering. Be seen as an authority, not just another advertisement. They Ask You Answer describes a fresh approach to marketing and the beginning of big things for your business.
6. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd
by Allan Dib
Book Description
To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn’t get done.
In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It’s literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, you’ll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero.
Whether you’re just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Planis the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth.
In this groundbreaking new book you’ll discover:
• How to get new customers, clients or patients and how to make more profit from existing ones.
• Why “big business” style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses.
• How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money.
• A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan.
• How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice.
• How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing.
• How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.
7. The Business of Being Social: A practical guide to harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media networks for all businesses
by Michelle Carvill and David Taylor
Book Description
A practical guide to harnessing the benefits of the major social media platforms for busy professionals. This fully updated second edition builds on the success of the first to show readers how to create powerful, integrated social media strategies for their businesses, build communities, and communicate effectively and profitably with customers.
8. Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins
by Mark Schaefer
Book Description
Are you overwhelmed by the breathtaking rate of change in the business world? Are confusing consumer trends, the unrelenting pace of technology, and the breakneck speed of digital marketing making you feel irrelevant and lost? Path-finding author Mark Schaefer provides an achievable and realistic framework to help you stay ahead of the curve by re-imagining marketing in a world where hyper-empowered consumers drive the business results. Marketing Rebellion will teach you:
How cataclysmic consumer trends are a predictable result of a revolution that started 100 years ago.
- How cataclysmic consumer trends are a predictable result of a revolution that started 100 years ago.
- Why businesses must be built on human impressions instead of advertising impressions.
- The five constant human truths at the heart of successful marketing strategy.
- Why customer loyalty is dying and what you need to do about it right now.
- How to help your best customers do the marketing for you.
- Actionable steps to provide an immediate course-correction for businesses of any size.
Through new research, singular insights, and inspiring case studies, this entertaining book challenges your view of what it means to be a marketer today and provides an innovative blueprint for business growth. The Marketing Rebellion is knocking at your door. Are you ready?
9. Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life
by Jeff Walker
Book Description
“Launch” will build your business — fast. Whether you’ve already got a business or you’re itching to start one, this is a recipe for getting more traction. Think about it — what if you could launch like Apple or the big Hollywood studios? What if your prospects eagerly counted down the days until they could buy your product? What if you could create such powerful positioning in your market that you all -but- eliminated your competition? And you could do all that no matter how humble your business or budget?
Since 1996 Jeff Walker has been creating hugely successful online launches. After bootstrapping his first Internet business from his basement, he quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success. But the success-train was just getting started — once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking.
Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches. “Launch” is the treasure map into that world — an almost secret world of digital entrepreneurs who create cash-on-demand paydays with their product launches and business launches.
Whether you have an existing business, or you have a service-based business and want to develop your own products so you can leverage your time and your impact, or you’re still in the planning phase — this is how you start fast. This formula is how you engineer massive success. Now the question is this — are you going to start slow, and fade away from there? Or are you ready for a launch that will change the future of your business and your life?
10. Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World
by Michael Hyatt
Book Description
As the former chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, author Michael Hyatt gained insight on the importance of combining compelling products with a meaningful platform. Now, with nearly three hundred thousand followers on Twitter, his large and growing platform serves as the foundation for his own successful writing, speaking, and business coaching practice.
In this straightforward how-to, he offers down-to-earth guidance on crafting an effective and meaningful online platform to help readers extend their influence, monetize it, and build a sustainable career.
Social media technologies have provided unprecedented opportunities for getting noticed and earning money in an increasingly noisy world. Platform goes behind the scenes into the world of social media success.
You’ll discover what bestselling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to gain contacts, connections, and followers and win customers in today’s crowded marketplace.
With proven strategies, easy-to-replicate formulas, and practical tips, this book makes it easier, less expensive, and more possible than ever to stand out from the crowd and launch a business.
Final Thoughts
Even though some of you might find reading a little boring, it is necessary for your career journey. So you should always acknowledge your limitations and pay attention to others opinions and experience.
You can never know enough. So make time every day for at least 30 minutes of reading. Read an article, a whitepaper, a book or watch a tutorial on YouTube and you will see that it will not be a waste of time, but a constructive activity.
Thanks for reading!
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