books
Top 5 marketing books to read in 2011
This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the September 12, 2011 @ 3:35 pm
In 2009 we wrote about 5 marketing books you must read. You can read the blog here, whilst all these books are still relevant many more have been published over the last two years.
So, in no particular order the top 5 marketing books we recommend you read in 2011 are:
- Inbound Marketing (Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah): Great book giving you an overview of ‘inbound marketing tactics’ – search engines, social media, blogs and email marketing. Describes what each tactic is, why you should use it and how you can use it.
- Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition (Michael A. Stelzner) – Reveals a strategy to market your business using great content, experts and restraining your sales and marketing messages. Learn the power of ‘educational marketing’ and how to build a business off the back of this.
- Real time marketing and PR (David Meerman Scott): With media now in ‘real time’ and 24/7 what can you do to capitalise on this new trend? Press comments are no longer required for tomorrow’s newspaper, it’s about reacting within minutes, riding the wave of a story, coming up with unique ideas and having your content go viral. Discover why real time matters and how you can exploit it.
- The Referral Engine (John Jantsch): This book explores a process for referrals summed up in the tagline: ‘teaching your business to market itself’. We all know word of mouth referrals are the best types of leads a business can get but don’t just wait for them come to you; this book outlines strategies to create a culture of referrals following a system know as: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, and Refer.
- Built to sell (John Warrillow): Not strictly a marketing book however a recommended read for any small business owner. Learn why so many small businesses never grow and how you can create your business to grow, scale and eventually have enough value in it to be sold.
5 marketing books you must read
This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the March 8, 2010 @ 11:08 am
I always try and read as much as I can and enjoy reading a good book on marketing. The 5 books below stand out as my favourites. Whether You’re new to marketing or have 40 years experience these books should offer you new perspectives:
- Purple Cow, Seth Godin – You drive past a field and see hundreds of brown cows. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all…then you see a purple cow, it stands out, you might go and look at it, touch it, even take a photo. At the pub later you ‘remark’ about it to your friends…what’s your organisation’s purple cow?
- Your Marketing Sucks, Mark Stevens – ‘If the moola you spend on marketing isn’t growing your business and bringing in more moola in return, then you have marketing that…sucks’ Rip up what you know, start with a blank page, get out there and find out how to create integrated marketing campaigns for your company.
- The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott – Does what it says on the tin. Provides descriptions of how marketing is changing from interrupting people to producing content that people want to engage with. Comprehensive descriptions on topics like blogs, wikis, forums and web content.
- Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin (again) – There are businesses that make meatballs. They have been around a long time and traditionally used TV and newspaper adverts for their marketing. Suddenly putting a sundae on these meatballs (Web 2.0 etc) just doesn’t work. For a sundae to work the business model has to change to accommodate them. Find out 14 trends that make this possible and some real life examples.
- Wally Olins On Brand – More of a focus on brands and branding, a brand is at the heart of a company and its marketing though, this book provides examples of how some of the world’s biggest brands were created and why they are so successful. It also explores some topics that aren’t usually discussed in marketing books for example how you really manage a service brand and how to brand a nation.