Online marketing is a highly evolving field with new techniques, theories, tactics, and tools emerging every day. There are numerous ways to get all the information and help that you need, from countless blogs, podcasts, webinars, and even workshops. But there are dozens of wasteful sources out there that gives nothing but just kill your time, same with the books. I have a love-hate relationship especially with online advertising books. Still, they are a major source of information, inspiration, and insight when it comes to learning how to follow the first steps in building up a successful eCommerce business.
Table of Contents
Here is my list of top digital marketing books you should be reading and a bonus recommendation at the end.
Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age by Jonah Berger
Why are some products and ideas talked about more than others? Why do some articles make the most emailed list? Why do some YouTube videos go viral? Word-of-mouth. Whether through face-to-face conversations, emails from friends, or online product reviews, the information and opinions we get from others have a strong impact on our own behaviour. Traditional marketing suggests that the factors that determine a business’ or product’s success are quality, price, and the advertising. Berger explains that it is much deeper than that, and that the more important factors are word-of-mouth transmission and social influence. Word-of-mouth is much more effective because it is persuasive, because people trust more what others recommend rather than what they see on T.V. or social media.
Old School Advertising Classics by Claude Hopkins and John E. Kennedy
The essential guidebook on how to make your marketing and advertising more profitable faster. The books are included here; Scientific Advertising and Reason Why Advertising. Unlike most business books, this one is not packed with filler content. This book gives you real life scenarios and tests you can implement in your own research. Great quick read to help you better understand advertising from the shoes of the people who have had great success in it. This book gives you real life scenarios and tests you can implement in your own research.
Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less Hardcover by Joe Pulizzi
One of the world’s leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don’t care about.
“Epic Content Marketing” takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act–without actually telling them to. Epic content, distributed to the right person at the right time, is how to truly capture the hearts and minds of customers. It’s how to position your business as a trusted expert in its industry. It’s what customers share and talk about.
Lean Marketing Series (2 books) by Allan Dib
This series includes 2 books; The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd and Lean Marketing: More leads. More profit. Less marketing. Marketing is the key to growing your business; however, it has become complicated, expensive, and difficult. The “Lean Marketing” series helps you master marketing with a clear, simple, and structured framework.
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. The lean movement has transformed manufacturing and is now revolutionizing marketing. Small, medium, and large businesses are getting bigger and better results with less marketing.
Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday
Megabrands like Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Airbnb were barely a blip on the radar years ago, but now they’re worth billions—with hardly a dime spent on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they relied on growth hacking to reach users and build their businesses. This short book is probably one of the only books you need on this topic, because you learn growth hacks by doing and experimenting, not by reading. This book gives you just enough information to get started.
Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions.
Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond. A must-read for any entrepreneur and even for entrepreneurs out there. The book is a gem chest full of inspiring and indicative examples of how successful companies achieved their growth. One important takeaway that this book also discussed is the event that may cause growth to stall, such as spending too much on a particular marketing channel to the point that it becomes saturated. A must-read for any entrepreneur and even for intrepreneurs out there. The book is a gem chest full of inspiring and indicative examples of how the successful companies achieved their growth.
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising by Perry Marshall, Thomas Meloche, Bob Regnerus
Facebook makes it easy for businesses like yours to share photos, videos, and posts to reach, engage, and sell to more than 1 billion active users. Advertising expert Perry Marshall is joined by co-authors Bob Regnerus and Thomas Meloche as he walks you through Facebook Advertising and its nuances to help you pinpoint your ideal audience and gain a ten-fold return on your investment. Not only is this the nuts and bolts of advertising on Facebook. This book goes into business strategy and philosophy of business. It provides complete strategies on advertising and marketing, and most of all, how make money, not to lose money. Written by a team of the best marketers in the business, led by well known long-time Internet Marketing and PPC Pro
Social eCommerce: Increasing Sales and Extending Brand Reach by Stephan Spencer, Jimmy Harding, Jennifer Sheahan
The book gives basic information about the different social media platforms, and how best to utilize them to reach your goals. Want to make money online? Then ignore social media at your own risk. Social media is vital if you want to your business to thrive, and though you can’t control the conversations, you can influence them. This book will teach you how. If mismanaged, social media can create more noise than signal. It can be a time and energy suck—for you and your audience. Or worse still, it can become an echo chamber for negative PR.
The authors recognize that social media strategy will vary depending on whether you’re selling a tangible product or a service. They offer guidelines for each. If done well, guerrilla social media marketing can help you persuade, command attention, establish dialogue, differentiate yourself, capture new markets, and outmaneuver the competition—all on a shoestring budget. Whether you’re selling digital goods and services, physical goods, or local services, this book has the answers.
Ultimate Guide to Google Ads by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, Bryan Todd
I know each paid media platform evolves quite frequently, especially Google Ads platform from interface to the features campaigns. But this book is great for the ones who prefer to dig in from scratch and refresh the holistic concept of Google’s money making idea. The actionable tips have been invaluable, if you were coming in as a genuine beginner to Google ads this book would set you up very well; and as a professional there is a ton of information to keep you on your toes also. Focusing on the growing number of mobile users and increased localized searches, Google Ads experts Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd, joined by AdWords and analytics evangelist Mike Rhodes, once again deliver the most comprehensive and current look at today’s fastest, most powerful advertising medium.
80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall
It is a useful book, good but not great, and a good introduction to Planet Perry. If you’re a sales and marketing professional, you can save 80 percent of your time and money by zeroing in on the right 20 percent of your market. By page 5 you’ll be applying 80/20² and 80/20³ to gain 10X, even 100X the success. If number analysis is not your strong suit, I suggest you find and/or appoint a “Data Friend.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to learn, even if data analysis makes you go cross-eyed. However, you will seriously amplify your results if you have a Data Friend with whom you can discuss and collaborate
Content Inc., Second Edition: Start a Content-First Business, Build a Massive Audience and Become Radically Successful (With Little to No Money) by Joe Pulizzi
Pulizzi takes the reader step-by-step from identifying a content provider’s sweet spot to the exit strategy with stops along the way for refining your content tilt, selecting your chief platform, building your audience, monetizing your content, diversifying your channels and/or platforms and acquiring content. Joe Pulizzi provides a lower-risk, more effective way to create a path to success by re-engineering the process that so often leads to failure: You’ll learn how to develop valuable content, build an audience around that content―and then create a product for that audience. Content Inc. walks you through the entire process
Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling by Jeb Blount
The brutal fact is the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipe and the root cause of an empty pipeline is the failure to consistently prospect. By ignoring the muscle of prospecting, many otherwise competent salespeople and sales organizations consistently underperform. When you read how someone as successful as Jeb has experienced the gammet of emotions all of us have and goes on to succeed, you can recognise that you can too. I think this book tells me that no matter how good your actual sales techniques are, the most important thing is to keep going. Step by step, Jeb Blount outlines his innovative approach to prospecting that works for real people, in the real world, with real prospects.
Dotcom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online with Sales Funnels by Russell Brunson
This book is not about increasing your conversions–yet these secrets will increase your conversions more than any headline tweak or split test you could ever hope to make. “Dotcom Secrets” is not just another marketing book; it’s a powerful guide that unveils the strategic essence of growing your business in the digital age. As someone always on the lookout for cutting-edge techniques and timeless strategies, I found Russell Brunson’s playbook to be a treasure trove of insights. The concept of sales funnels might not be new, but Brunson’s approach to dissecting, understanding, and then deploying them is truly innovative.
Own Your Niche: Hype-Free Internet Marketing Tactics to Establish Authority in Your Field and Promote Your Service-Based by Stephanie Chandler
Are you ready to Own Your Niche? Manipulative sales tactics, long sales letters with big and bold headlines, and spammy emails aren’t the only way to get visibility and capture sales online. Own Your Niche brings authenticity back to internet marketing, teaching you how to showcase your business with practical, easy-to-use strategies that you can implement yourself. The book is packed with a lot of great short concise nuggets of information that is easy to quickly absorb and put into practice. In addition, she does a phenomenal job of digging up a lot of really great resources and including their web addresses as well as explaining what the service is and her own personal experience with using it, which I really liked. I thought the resource lists was one of the most valuable pieces of the book.
In addition to this list, if you are looking to learn the basics and easy-to-read concept books I suggest having a look at Digital Marketing for Dummies and all their marketing series.