Reading has a vital role to play in our lives. It's about thinking, sharing, and connecting with others. For us, digital marketers, reading is an integral part of what we do. It is essential to stay up to date with the latest and cutting edge marketing tech products that can help us get more bang for our marketing bucks. It is also necessary to be familiar with new studies and thoughts and ideas in the field of marketing. Experimentation is, after all, the name of the game in marketing.  

If you are exposed to a multitude of thoughts and ideas, you will conduct a wider variety of tests in your marketing campaigns and thereby exponentially improve the chances of success.

With that being said, let’s find some of the best books this year that have helped us immensely to turn into better marketers.

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

Author Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB(a subsidiary of Gartner) busted longstanding misconceptions about sales in their previous bestseller The Challenger Sale. Now they have turned to a new critical topic of consumer loyalty-with a book essentially turning traditional wisdom on its head.

Companies dedicate untold time and money to customers. Nevertheless, CEB's thorough analysis shows that it is highly overrated: loyalty has far more to do with how well businesses deliver on their simple commitments than with how sparkling service quality may be. Forget bells and whistles, and fix consumer problems.

The Effortless Experience presents the four pillars of low-cost customer experience with comprehensive data, insights, and profiles. In this book, you will be presented with tools and models that you can quickly implement to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and eventually create the elusive loyalty that all marketers strive to create.

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits

Higher quality information enables higher-quality decision making, better targeting, and greater reach. Big data has become an essential resource for the most successful marketers, and it is becoming less of competitive advantage and more of an industry standard. Staying relevant as the industry changes require a full understanding and application of big data, and this book offers the realistic direction your company might need.

The industry has ushered in a new era of customers owning all the cards. With an unparalleled competition in both the B2C and the B2B fields, companies must develop a deeper understanding of their consumers. Big data is the key to this insight, as it offers a holistic view of consumers as well as prospects — who they are and who they maybe tomorrow. Big Data-Driven Business is a comprehensive roadmap to the future, as seen through the big data lens, with expert guidance on real-world applications. Discover what big data is and how it will transform business in this book.

Authored by a marketing expert and the CEO of a multi-million-dollar B2B marketing company covering over 90 percent of the U.S. business demographic, this book is a detailed and open guide on how to attract consumers, overcome rivals, and raise the bottom line using big data.



Content Marketing For Traffic And Sales- How To Use Direct Response Copywriting, For More Effective Content Marketing

I am sure you would have read a ton of books on content marketing, but this one feels different. This book brings a breath of fresh air amongst all the noise about content marketing. There's a ton of insightful, actionable details inside.

When you feel like you're writing a lot without receiving leads and sales for your efforts, we recommend reading Content Marketing For Traffic And Sales.

You will learn things like:

  • The 3 part content strategy to create content to attract your audience, automate your sales, and scale with traffic systems.
  • A plug and play planning process, to connect the dots and drive more sales.
  • The three types of a salesperson, and how to become the most potent version using advanced sales psychology
  • How to plant your flag and be seen as an authority in your space
  • The four traffic systems you need to leverage to grow your business.
  • The nine content archetypes
  • How to create 'pre-frame' sales content to automate your sales process
  • How to develop kick-ass case studies using the same template that generated the author $3 Million in client requests in 2 weeks


The Choice Factory- 25 behavioral biases that influence what we buy

As modern age marketers, we're always shaping decisions, and we also need to consider what drives them. To anyone who wants to know, The Choice Factory is a must-read.

The author explores how psychological shortcuts influence our behavior by witnessing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food decisions to important work-place movements. Richard Shotton has drawn on data from academics, real-life ad campaigns, and his original study, with a strong emphasis on the marketing value of understanding what makes us tick.

The Choice Factory is written in a fun and easily readable style. It is complete with 25 short chapters discussing a cognitive bias and outlining practical ways to adapt it to your marketing challenges. Supporting his debate, Shotton provides perspectives from new interviews with some of the top media experts like Rory Sutherland, Lucy Jameson, and Mark Earls.

Hit Makers- The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

Every company, every artist, every person interested in promoting themselves and their work wants to know what makes some works so popular while others just vanish. Hit Makers is a mystical adventure tour of the last century of pop culture blockbusters and the most critical twenty-first - century currency — the attention of people.

Nothing just "goes viral" without reason. If you think of a famous movie, song, or app that came from nowhere to become a word of mouth sensation in today 's crowded media, the real story is missing. Each blockbuster has a hidden history — of power, control, dark broadcasters, and an ardent cult that makes popular trends.

Through his groundbreaking investigation, Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the secret psychology why we like what we want and exposes the dynamics of cultural markets that form our lives invisibly. Destroying the nostalgic hit-making myths that govern pop culture and industry, Thompson demonstrates quality is inadequate for success, no one has "good taste," and some of history's most successful items were just a bad break away from epic failure. This may be a new world, but what viewers and customers want is timeless realities. Customers love a familiar surprise: a bold but sly product.



Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives B2B Sales

Stone provides a brilliant 15-chapter playbook that includes the suggested structures, question lists, and models that make you want to put aside the book and try the strategies. There are so few good product marketing books that explain the discipline without covering you with too much technical jargon or too many worksheets, but Stone does a fantastic job explaining it. She has realistic advice on how to appeal to customers beyond profiles and effective go-to-market strategy.  Another excellent segment is account-based marketing, where she discusses the vital role that marketing plays in identifying and operating differently significantly. As a consultant and seasoned marketer, she brings her comprehensive approach and expertise to the complexities of a marketing strategy that Drives Sales. Highly recommended.



One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days

With in-depth interviews of celebrities, influencers, and marketing experts, Kane teaches you how to develop intimate, exclusive, and meaningful content to reach your core audience. You will also learn how to construct a multi-media brand across social networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.

If you're looking for a great book to learn how to establish your brand, this could be it. One million followers concentrate on creating your brand through social media and many other strategies. The writing is easy to follow so that you can start right away.

Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On

Adam L. Penenberg shares the remarkable tale of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed “Viral Loops” unparalleled ability to build thriving online businesses—some worth billions of dollars—that we've all come to rely on. The trick is that they made something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their company.

The book brings in a perfect introduction to the Virality definition. It introduces with excellent details to some of the most popular viral products and uncovers some of the significant failures at the same time. Viral Loop is a must read for young digital marketers who want to learn more about growth, network effects, and ultimate growth saturation.


Brand Identity Essentials, Revised and Expanded: 100 Principles for Building Brands

The image of a company includes far more than its logo alone. Identity is vital to creating a winning image of a business, and it is the responsibility of the designer to visualize the brand and to build what the consumer sees. Brand Identity Essentials, a classic branding guide that has now been revised and extended, lays the groundwork for brand creation, demonstrating the development of successful brands through world-class design examples.

Brand Identity Essentials is a must-have guide for not just designers but digital marketers too, who work in brand building.

Faster, Smarter, Louder: Master Attention in a Noisy Digital Market

In today's digital world, the success of a business lies in mixing technical innovation and social tactics to attract and keep consumers. Without an excellent digital channel, time and resources are lost, information ignored, and prospective customers simply disappear. In this book, authors Aaron Agius and Gián Clancey share the secrets that made their two-person agency a global pioneer in digital marketing. Via personal experiences and real-world studies, Aaron and Gián prove that attracting multimillion-dollar customers isn't just about AdWords, SEO, and social media. To make a splash, you need interest, credibility, and human connections. Learn how to develop a digital marketing strategy integrating industry-proven approaches with contemporary social science.