There is no better time to catch up on some good reads than in the summer. The days are longer providing you with a few extra hours to relax, at the end of a workday, with some sun and a good book. So to ensure you spend those valuable hours right, we saved you the time spent searching and compiled a list of our top five marketing books to help motivate your strategies this summer.
1. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
by Ann Handley
Marketing influencer, and author, Ann Handley, breaks down, in 6 parts, how to write great content that draws and keeps customers. She provides sage advice on how to write quality content that gets results. The 5th section, concerning, “Things Marketers Write,” content for, like landing pages, blogs, emails, infographics and more, is most valuable. Experienced marketers will still learn something on every page of this section. It’s a ridiculously handy book that will help optimize even the best writer’s work.
2. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
by Jay Baer
Baer, president of a global consulting firm, is a marketing and customer service expert, who has advised some of the most iconic Fortune 500 organizations, outlines the two types of haters any business is likely to come across in this book. He identifies what they want and tells you how to give it to them. This book is full of entertaining case studies so you can see responses in action. In addition to being good for a laugh, it also provides valuable statistics/insights that will help inform brand strategy. Baer presses you to discover the opportunities a complaint provides, and “to turn lemons into lemonade, morph bad news into good, and keep the customers you already have.” This book will keep you loving your customers, “hugging your haters,” and delivering mastery customer service experiences.
3. They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and To-day’s Digital Consumer
by Marcus Sheridan
Marcus Sheridan, coined a web marketing guru by the New York Times after he used content marketing to lift his pool company from the economic crash of 2008 to become one of the largest in the country, bases his book on two fundamental assumptions: your customers are intelligent readers who want to be educated. So if you have answers, the correct content tactics will get you to the top of the search results and seen by millions every day on the internet. They Ask You Answer explains how to market by knowing your customer’s pains. Sheridan’s basic formula of just answering when asked will establish your company as a great teacher. This book is an answer to success for the marketers who are willing to be objective to a fresh approach.
4. Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers
by Bernadette Jiwa
A global authority on the role of story in business, Bernadette Jiwa, explains in her book, that divides into sections of strategy, context, and story, “Marketing is about giving people frames of reference and context. And above all, marketing is about becoming part of peoples’ stories.” Often caught up on the short-term goals, Jiwa notes, that we miss building relationships and deeply connecting with customers.
She urges us to find a way to matter to our customers. Once we do, then we no longer need to worry about the competition. By optimizing your abilities to solve the needs of your customers, you will create long lasting, loving relationships.
5. Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook that Drives B2B Sales
by Samantha Stone
This how-to-guide for B2B marketers, by Samantha Stone, teaches us how to partner with others to achieve sales goals to get the right results. Stone, a revenue catalyst who helps unleash the possible in companies with complex selling processes, cites her real-life experiences. She advises that sales driven by leveraging marketing best practices are about being pro-active. Her advice on how to collaborate and her discussion on marketing fundamentals, as well, makes this guide a handy playbook for any marketer to see their worthy possibilities.
At Bloom, we are always looking for ways to improve our marketing skills and love it when we are enlightened by a new or better approach. Of course, we value the how-to guides, but sometimes all it takes is a few wise words of advice from a content guru or an expertly told tale of conversion that can lead us to your next marketing success. So if any of these books make it to the top your reading list, please be sure to let us know why — and enjoy the summer!
