10 Best Marketing Books to Read

Marketing is a tough topic because its often under valued, but most of the time, you don’t get sales without a great marketing system. The importance of marketing is only magnified in the digital age, where there is not always an opportunity for a salesman. Matters only get more complicated when you get to Savy consumers who are used to ducking and dodging marketing messages. The best marketing books will help you to navigate this world.

These books will help to give you a full scope of how you should approach marketing. These books are not going to provide you with the nitty-gritty of how to do SEO or how to set up a marketing funnel. You can read some useful blog posts and experiment to figure that out. These books will help you to set your overall marketing strategy.

10 Best Marketing Books

Bonus – Pumpkin Plan

The book is brilliant! It’s much more geared toward people running marketing agencies, but the concepts apply to anyone. The big idea of the book is that you should cut off your losers and worst customers and focus on your best customers. When you want to grow a big pumpkin, you do the same thing by killing the smaller pumpkins because they steal resources from the bigger pumpkin that you care about.

The concept that you have to say yes to anything you can get is false. You should focus on your profitable customers, your most productive tasks, and cut the rest so you can maintain delivering the highest quality of resources to the things that matter.

#10 – Hooked

Hooked was the first book to come out after social media blew and help people to understand why we are so addicted to our phones. He breaks it into four simple phases. 

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Reward 
4. Investment

The trigger is what makes you think of taking action because you’re anticipating a reward to come. The work is considered to be a habit like opening Instagram, and the prize is what you want and why you took action in the first place. Lastly, the investment is what keeps you coming back, you already have put the time into the product, and don’t want to go through the effort of switching. 

#9 – Contagious

Contagious has excellent content and a smart cover. The idea of the book is learning how great ideas spread. Every marketer wants their ideas to spread, and this book is guaranteed to offer many ideas to help you do that.

Contagious is a book worth reading a few times. Each time you go through it, you will take away enormous dome ideas that can help you bring your business to the next level.

# 8 – Tipping Point

The Tipping Point is about getting great ideas to spread but by using people. The core idea is that nothing spreads without certain types of people. For example, every good idea needs to get to the connector.

They are the person in a community who knows everyone and knows who to go to if you need anything. They can help to get information or idea to the right people at the right time.

#7 – Crossing The Chasm

Crossing the Chasm is one of the older books on the list, but its an oldie but goodie. The author was way ahead of his time. He wrote this in the 90s. The book explains how an idea or product becomes mainstream. There are tonnes of ideas that are fads, but they never hit the mainstream for a variety of reasons.

If your goal is to market your product so that its a household name, you need to read this, to cross the Chasm, you go from selling to the early adopters to the old majority. The issue is that these sets of groups are looking for very different things. If you don’t understand that it can feel like your company is growing like crazy and then all of a sudden it stops.

#6 – The 10X Rule

The 10X rule can feel like the opposite of the Pumpkin Plan. Grant Cardone provides a different perspective. Where the Pumpkin Plan is saying focus and do less, Cardone is trying to get you to be present everywhere. Cardone markets himself by do everything and throwing his all at everything he can.

Cardone does not want you to aim for your next million people; he wants you to seek for your next 10 million. The big idea is to aim higher than you have been designing. Everything you say you want, multiply that goal by 10.

#5 – Oglivy on Advertising

Ogilvy is known as one of the most fabulous advertisers ever. This book is from 1985, so you may be thinking it’s outdated because advertising is dead. It’s not dead at all; it’s just shifted to different platforms. Advertising is not about Cereal Boxes and TV as much as it’s about Social Media and Podcasts now.

When you read this book, you will see that advertising has changed, but it also has now. The principles that he is talking about using to lure in more buyers are the same things that marketers are doing now.

#4 – Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness is about how Zappos uses excellent customer service as their marketing tool. Marketing is anything that a company can do to get people to talk about them. Zappos has mastered this by providing customer service so amazing that people have to tell their friends about what happened.

#3 – Hacking Growth

Hacking Growth is the best book for using data to make marketing choices. The authors of the book helped to grow companies like Dropbox by measuring the right metrics. Hacking Growth is beautiful because its a step by step guide for creating new ideas and testing to see if it produces the result you would like to have. If you are a digital marketer, this book is a must-read. It will help you get more customers in your funnel and to keep moving them down the funnel.

#2 – Jab Jab Jab Right Hook

Gary V. nailed it with this book. The jabs and hook from the sport of boxing. Jabs are quick punches that don’t pack much power, but the hook is the knockout punch. Twenty-five years ago, companies could go right for the knockout punch. The consumer would see a commercial on TV, and that was the knockout punch.

Now you have to provide value. You sue social media, your blog, and all the other medium to keep customers honest with some jabs. One they take your soft jabs, you can throw a compelling hook and go for the sale.

#1 – Purple Cow

A purple cow is one of the best marketing books you can read. Seth Godin put together a powerful book that is easy to read. He also has a TED talk, which I had seen first. I didn’t think I needed to read it after watching the discussion, but that was not the truth. The book is even better. 

The concept is simple. Only remarkable things stand out. If you were drawing and you saw a purple cow, you would stop because it was so different. You would take a picture with it and put it on Instagram. The same needs to be said for your product. Be remarkable. 

Summary of The Best Marketing Books

1. Purple Cow
2. Jab Jab Jab Right Hook
3. Hacking Growth
4. Delivering Happiness
5. Oglivy on Advertising
6. The 10X Rule
7. Crossing The Chasm
8. The Tipping Point
9. Contagious
10. Hooked
11. The Pumpkin Plan