10 Wonderful Digital Marketing Books You’ll Want to Read

In digital marketing, the theory is just as important as the application. Our key to success in this industry is marketing the products that we built right. It’s about how we tell the story, know our audience, and actively engage and interact with them. That’s why marketers and product managers must work closely together to ensure unity and consistency. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving field and the trends change every time. Here are 10 digital marketing books you’ll want to read to give you the knowledge and keep you in the loop. 

10 Digital Marketing Books You’ll Want to Read

What Customers Crave by Nicholas Webb

What Customers Crave examines how the hyper-connected economy is radically changing consumer expectations and reveals what companies need to do to stay on top. The solution rests on two simple questions: What do your customers love? What do they hate? Find the answers, and you’re well on your way to success. Jam-packed with tools and examples, What Customers Crave helps you reinvent how you engage with customers (both digitally and non-digitally) and:

• Gain invaluable insights into who they are and what they care about
• Use listening posts and Contact Point Innovation to refine customer types
• Engineer experiences for each micro market that are not only exceptional but insanely relevant
• Connect across the five most important touchpoints
• Co-create with your customers

When you learn to provide your customers with exactly what they want, they not only buy—they come back again and again…and bring their friends. (source)

One key in having a successful digital marketing strategy is to know your customers. To improve your marketing offers, you need to know what problems your audience has and how to solve them. What do your customers desire? Once you know your customers, you’ll have ideas on what their expectations are and you can do your best to meet them. This book is packed with tools, examples, and resources to help businesses reinvent how they engage with their customers both physically and virtually.

Building a Story brand by Donald Miller

Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching readers the seven universal story points all humans respond to; the real reason customers make purchases; how to simplify a brand message so people understand it; and how to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media. Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion-dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers. (source)

This book is written by a New York Times bestselling author and it’s a proven solution to equip business leaders who are struggling with their businesses. The book offers revolutionary methods for connecting with consumers and provides the readers with competitive tips they can apply in real life.

Contagious by Jonah Berger

What makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is a blender. If you’ve wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread – for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you’re a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on. (source)

This book is a best seller for a reason. It offers specific, actionable tactics to help you spread your message effectively by having the right design and making the right shareable content. This book is for everyone, whether you are a small or big business owner, a manager, a politician, or an educator. This book will show you how to make your idea or product stand out and go out into the world.

Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion By Robert Cialdini

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.

You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success. (source)

This may be an old book, but it’s definitely one of the best marketing books out there. Influence offers an effective outline for understanding what leads people to make decisions. The author uses true-to-life examples to guide the readers through the six principles of persuasion. Although you won’t be learning about certain channel techniques for digital marketing, this book gives you the building blocks to achieve a digital marketing strategy that guarantees positive conversion outcomes through the application of consistency, social proof, authority, reciprocity, and more.

Digital Marketing Strategy by Simon Kingsnorth

Digital and social media are essential aspects of a marketing department’s function; therefore, it is important that they are integrated into the organization’s wider goals. Uniting digital marketing techniques with business strategy and established marketing models such as the 7 P’s, Porter’s Five Forces, and Customer Lifetime Value, author Simon Kingsnorth demonstrates how to formulate the best strategy for a company.

Rather than presenting a “one size fits all” model, Kingsnorth brings various strategies to life through case studies, charts, illustrations, and checklists. Digital Marketing Strategy covers what digital marketing is, how to budget and forecast, acquisition, personalization, customer service, user experience, content strategy, how to analyze and perform social measurements, and how to structure and present a digital marketing plan in order to win support and funding. (source)

It has all things social media, content marketing, SEO, user experience, automation, customer loyalty, and more. This book is a roadmap for digital marketers who want to optimize their strategies. It offers practical implementation guides on SEO, email, paid search, lead gen, and more.

Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown & Sean Ellis

So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies’ extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and its practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers, and executives who make up the community of GrowthHackers.com.

Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses on customers attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more. (source)

This book is a comprehensive toolkit that every company in any industry can utilize to implement its own growth strategy. This book covers how to set up and run growth teams how to identify and test growth levers, and how to evaluate the results. It focuses on customers, on how to get them, keep them, engage them, and monetize them. With this book, you will learn how to increase your customer base and market share. It will also walk you through the process of creating and executing your own growth hacking strategy.

Permission Marketing By Seth Godin

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity—time—Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now, this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness — and greatly improve the chances of making a sale. (source)

Anything written by Seth Godin is worth the read, and this book is a great one as it can influence your approach to marketing strategy.

This book focuses on the importance of building a relationship with your audience and customers gradually over time. Once that relationship is established, your marketing will be most effective as your target audience has given your the ‘permission’ to market to them.

Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.

If you have a website, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.

Yeah, but who cares about writing anymore? In a time-challenged world dominated by short and snappy, by click-bait headlines and Twitter streams and Instagram feeds and gifs and video and Snapchat and YOLO and LOL and #tbt. . . does the idea of focusing on writing seem pedantic and ordinary? (source)

When you get into digital marketing, writing will always be part of the job. This book is a helpful guide to make your writing better. If you are looking to improve your copy and content, Ann Hadley has great tips and guides to write engaging content that will attract and retain customers.

They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan

A revolutionary marketing strategy has 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. (source)

In today’s digital age, the strategies that proved to be effective years ago may not be up to par in the current time. To have success in the digital marketing scene, businesses must be all about getting to know what makes their customers tick. What are their audience’s concerns, questions, and problems? And how can they help provide a solution for them? Every day, consumers rely on the internet to answer their endless questions. Having the answers to what they need is the key to attracting new customers to become potential buyers to your company. This is what this book is all about.

Content Machine By Dan Norris

Content Machine outlines a strategy for using content marketing to build a 7 figure business with zero advertising.

By teaching the fundamentals of content marketing, how to create great content, and how to stand out from the crowd, simplifies the otherwise challenging process of creating content with impact.

The book outlines the #1 biggest mistake that kills content marketing efforts and how the best content marketers in the world have built their audience, their content, and their business. It provides downloads and frameworks to help the reader with every aspect of content marketing, from idea generation to writing guidelines, to hiring and scaling a content team.

Whether you are a blogger, content marketer, entrepreneur, or marketing manager, Content Machine will help you see the return you deserve from your content marketing efforts. (source)

For those who want to improve and develop their content marketing strategy to commercial success, this is a very good book to read. It contains more than just creating blog posts and mastering SEO techniques. It’s a book that will change your whole perspective on that matter.

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