Top 5 books to help you start marketing
You’ve started the new year with a fresh optimism for growing your business. You know that you need to get better at promoting your products or services and engaging more with your customers, but you just aren’t sure where to start.
We’ve put together a list of books that can help you understand, refine and implement your marketing goals this year*
*if you don’t have time or inclination to read them all, rest assured that we already have, and you can get us on your team to do your marketing for you!
Youtility: Why smart marketing is about help, not hype
https://www.youtilitybook.com/
Jay Baer’s great little book from 2013 is an ideal place to start thinking about marketing your SME. The basic principle is that the best marketing doesn’t shout about why you should buy a particular product, it provides helpful information to help the consumer make up their mind, and then positions itself so that it’s the obvious choice when it comes to the purchase.
Everybody Writes: Your Go-to guide for creating ridiculously good content
Ann Handley is the content writing guru. By now you’ll have heard how crucial “Content Marketing” is, but you might not know what “content” is or how to generate it. Handley reminds us that everybody writes – all the time (emails, letters, notes, Instagram captions) – and it’s easier than you think to start writing. The book also includes plenty of examples of common grammatical missteps and ways to communicate clearly and effectively.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
Gary Vaynerchuck (or Gary Vee as he’s known) is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he knows his stuff and has been very successful in building his own businesses. This book (buy the hardback if you can) is a comprehensive visual guide to using marketing and social media to tell your story in the most effective way, providing loads of full colour examples, each annotated and examined to rate its effectiveness. If you can cope with his full on, enthusiastic writing style, his original marketing guide Crushing It is also worth investing in.
Now in its 6th edition, David Meerman Scott’s bestseller covers the fundamentals of marketing and PR in our brave new technological world. The old rules of print advertising and hard selling no longer apply and this book explains why, and what you can do now to reach your audience.
Digital Marketing for Dummies
You’re probably familiar with the Dummies format – yellow cover, thin paper and lots of bullet points – and Ryan Deiss’s Digital Marketing installment doesn’t disappoint. If you’re completely new to the concept to marketing then there are worse places to start. You might skip some of the more technical chapters initially but there are useful explanations of different channels, concepts and ideas which you can quickly turn into practical tools for your business.
At HeyStrategy we’re firm believers in continuous learning, and love sharing our knowledge with our clients, helping them to learn how to tackle their own marketing or choosing the best time to engage with a consultant to take care of some of the most important elements. If you want to get your year off to the best start, or just want to talk about an interesting concept that you’ve read about, drop me a line: [email protected]
