What’s the Best Marketing Book on the Market? Let’s Find Out

There’s nothing better than reading when it comes to learning new things. At least, that’s what we think. Unlike video training or podcasts, reading actually requires 100% of your concentration and effort, which means that there’s a better chance for you to absorb and memorize everything you’re trying to learn.

Along with that, books offer an excellent level of detail that cannot be found in other mediums, and so they are extremely beneficial to those of you who already have some experience with marketing and want to broaden your knowledge and horizons.

That being said, much like with anything else in life, not all books are created equal, and some are better left unread. To spare you the trouble of spending money on and reading books that are simply not worth the money or the effort, we’ve compiled this list of 10 best books about advertising that will not only give you new information to consider but will also be fun and engaging to read, so that you’re not bored out of your mind while trying to go through them.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Is There Such a Thing as a “Best Marketing Book”?

Let’s kick off things by saying that this title of “best marketing book” is extremely subjective, as we all enjoy different writing styles and like to absorb information in a variety of ways. However, for the sake of this article, we’ve defined the best marketing book as engaging, containing new and interesting perspectives, and relevant to the current state of events in the world of marketing. Picking just one book and dedicating an entire article to it turned out to be a mission impossible for our team at Camberlion. We’ve prepared a list of 10 reads that promise to open the world of marketing to you and broaden your knowledge on all kinds of subjects connected to the industry.

Our hope is that by the end of this article and after you’re done reading all our recommendations, you will have found your own answer to the question, “What is the best marketing book?”

10 Best Marketing Books

To begin the list, let’s first start with books that are suitable both for people who know nothing about digital marketing and people who already have experience in the field.

“This is Marketing” by Seth Godin

It would be illegal to make a list of the best digital marketing books and not include this absolute classic by Seth Godin. This book is arguably one of the bibles of the digital marketing industry, as it consists of all of the wisdom and experience of one of the very best marketers in the world.

The great thing about “This is Marketing” is that it’s suitable for people who don’t know anything about marketing and people who have already studied the subject or have some experience in the sector. Seth does his best to analyze all sorts of marketing topics as carefully as possible and explore a game-changing marketing approach. The topics covered in this book include the history of marketing, the reduced relevance of mass media in this new digital era, and how you can market in a way that targets your specific audience. Along with that, Godin puts particular emphasis on having a people-centered, authentic, and compassionate approach to marketing.

This book is a guide on how to build trust amongst your potential customers and how to make the buying choice feel entirely natural for them. Overall, by reading “This is Marketing,” you will learn all about the history of the industry, its current development, and what you can do to build a meaningful connection with your target audience.

“Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath

“Made to Stick” is yet another absolute marketing bestseller, and for a good reason. This one tackles important subjects such as why some ideas don’t thrive while also offering you practical solutions that will help you improve any future marketing campaigns.

In this book, the authors make sure to explore all the reasons why most marketing ideas die early and while only some succeed, along with showing you what you can do to make sure your ideas survive.

By reading “Made to Stick,” you will understand the dynamism of business ideas, along with what makes them understandable, remembered, noticeable, and catered upon. Dan and Chip go into detail and examine all the factors that define efficient marketing and the best methods for your ideas to get noticed and gain traction. In many ways, this is a book that challenges all your perceptions on why some ideas/ people succeed and shows you that all of those “great” ideas have six common traits that anyone can implement. It’s an eye-opening read that analyzes the very principles of ideas that work and shows you how you can apply them to your own marketing strategy.

“Hooked” by Nir Eyal

“Hooked” is a book that takes one part of marketing – the product – and examines how you can make it look desirable or even addictive to your target customers. According to the author, by the time you finish reading this book, you will know how to execute the hooks outlined in it, and it will help you experience business growth while increasing your customers’ lifetime value.

Overall, “Hooked” is a book that teaches you how to create products that are addictive and leave prospective buyers hooked. The author analyzes why people get drawn to certain products and services more than others and analyzes how they make purchasing decisions without overthinking or even logically considering what they’re buying.

In “Hooked,” Eyal explores a four-step model that guides you to better understand human behavior and how to use that understanding to keep your customers coming back, even without tons of marketing.

“The Influencer Code” by Amanda Russell

Influencer marketing is the “IT” thing in the advertising industry right now, which makes this book even more relevant to any marketer who wants to be successful. In “The Influencer Code,” the author dives into the concept of influence and trust and how essential it is for the development of excellent digital marketing campaigns.

Along with that, Russell goes on to describe her personal marketing journey, how she began recording her success and how to shift your focus from transactions to building lasting relationships with prospects.

If you want to utilize influencer marketing in any way, then “The Influencer Code” is a must-read book for you. It’s an essential resource that will enable you to understand the dynamics of influencer marketing while helping you identify the best way to use influencers to your advantage.

Amanda Russell goes on to discuss how you can do influencer marketing the right way by using a variety of factors to help determine which influencers suit your business’s style and marketing approach. Furthermore, by reading this book, you will learn how to approach, research, and hire influencers while integrating them into your campaigns in a way that helps you achieve your marketing goals.

“Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller

We often discuss how important it is to tell a story in marketing. By reading “Building a StoryBrand,” you will learn about the seven universal, powerful story elements that will help you tell your brand’s story in a way that influences and engages your potential customers.

In “Building a StoryBrand,” Donald Miller helps business owners and marketers save money on campaigns by encouraging them to use the revolutionary methods of communication that will help their company have a competitive advantage while connecting with the target audience. You will learn the best ways to make your customer understand why they have to buy your services, products, or ideas.

Overall, this book will help you improve how you talk about your business and help you determine the value it gives to customers. It’s an extremely practical book with many examples and case studies that make you feel more prepared to implement its lessons in real life.

“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” by Gary Vaynerchuk

It would be difficult to make a list of the best marketing books without including at least one Gary V. book in it. “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” is essentially Gary’s way of providing us all with a blueprint for developing a terrific social media marketing strategy.

Of course, the symbolic “jab, jab, jab” refers to what Gary gives as advice to any marketer: give out valuable content for free so that you can start building trust and relationships with potential customers. On the other hand, the “hook” metaphor refers to the time when you start asking for sales. Vaynerchuk goes on to explain that communication remains vital, but the key is context, especially nowadays.

It’s not just about having high-quality content (jabs). It’s also vital that the content is adapted to fit the specific social media platform it’s aimed to go on. In this short book, Gary discusses all the ways to produce content that people actually engage with and then how to start asking for that sale. All in all, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” gives incredible insight into how the world of social media operates while giving you useful advice on how to take advantage of the system.

“Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout

We live in a world rich in stimulus and ever-changing. That’s why it’s getting harder and harder for brands to break through and make an impression on customers. Nowadays, people are so overwhelmed by the constant stream of content and news that it’s extremely difficult to make people pay attention. People are so overly satisfied that they don’t have any gap in their consciousness that desperately needs to be filled by a new product. In this book, the authors get a bit sneaky with the concept of “positioning.”

As Ries and Trout define it, positioning involves carving out your own space in the customer’s mind, not just for your brand but for the entire niche you operate in. Even though that may lead to you opening a space for a competitor, you can still use that to your advantage by allowing your brand to “coattail” off it. Overall, “Positioning” is an eye-opening but brilliant approach to practical marketing that teaches you all the ways to stand out in the eyes of your potential customers.

“Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger

When you read the title of this book, you almost feel like it hits the nail on the head, especially nowadays when the most important question people ask is, “How can I go viral?”

In this book, professor Jonah Berger goes into detail and explores what makes something go viral, or more so, why some ideas get so much more traction than others. In order for him to write this book, Berger spent the last 10 years tracking the list of a rumor and making a map of the phenomenon known as word-of-mouth. He did that in the hope of identifying a pattern that marketers tap into whenever they want to create something unique. At the end of this study, Berger came up with six principles as to why some things catch on and become viral, and he shares them in this must-read book.

“Growth Hacker Marketing” by Ryan Holiday

This is a book dedicated to teaching you how to use growth hacking as an advantage and gain optimal success. It’s an absolute go-to guide if you have already decided on the traditional marketing trajectory and are willing to explore a new way of doing things.

With “Growth Hacker Marketing,” Holiday wants to show you how you can identify, measure and test growth opportunities that will make your company go viral. He explains how companies like Dropbox, Snapchat, and Instagram used their branding to grow without wasting money on traditional advertising methods like TV commercials, press releases, or billboards.

Along with that, Ryan explains the way marketing works nowadays, and the book is filled with case studies of small businesses and startups from all kinds of industries as a way to inspire you and give you ideas.

“Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell

Advertising is all about learning how to make people do something that you want them to do. This book by renowned psychologist Malcolm Gladwell explores just the kind of decision-making that usually happens without logical thought and in an instant. He discusses why some people have good instincts and why some people can make logical decisions in a second, while others fail to decide quickly on even the simplest of things.

Along with that, he introduces the notion of “thin-slicing,” which is essentially the art of making a good decision from a complex set of variables by sorting out only the information that is truly valuable to you. Even though this is not a traditional book about marketing, this read on decision-making can be of vital importance to every marketer that wants to learn how to influence people to make certain decisions, as it provides profound insights on the behavioral specifics of humans and explores in depth the art of decision-making.

Keep on Reading

New books get released every year, and the world of marketing is ever-evolving, which is why you need to constantly update your library with new books so that you’re always on top of current trends and developments. Along with that, you have to make sure you’re constantly getting new information from blogs or news articles so that you’re never late to anything new that happens in the marketing industry.