Marketing is a big topic. It’s more than the four P’s of product, price, place, and promotion.Marketers and small business folk love to find the best books on marketing, especially the best new books on marketing. Well, with a focus on small business marketing and books that provide practical how-t0 advice on how to be a better marketer, here’s our list of the best marketing books for 2019 produced as part of our own The Marketing Book. Got a suggestion? Email it over.
A List of the Best Books on Marketing for 2019
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition – Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. – Rating: 5 Stars
- The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd – In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It’s literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it you’ll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. – Rating: 5 Stars
- The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, Newsjacking, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly – David Meerman Scott brings a new classic to marketing. The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an international bestseller with more than 375,000 copies sold in twenty-nine languages. In the latest edition of this pioneering guide to the future of marketing, you’ll get a step-by-step action plan for leveraging the power of the latest approaches to generating attention for your idea or your business. You’ll learn how get the right information to the right people at the right time—at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. – Rating: 5 Stars
- Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen – New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach readers how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses. Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. – Rating: 5 Stars
- Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business – Whether you’re a shy YouTuber just starting out, or the leader of a Fortune 500 company, your superfans are out there waiting for you to connect with them. You don’t need to change the entire world to build a successful business; you just need to change someone’s world.
People don’t become superfans the moment they find you. They become superfans because of the magical moments you create for them over time. – Rating: 5 Stars - Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They’re systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational. – Rating: 5 Stars
- Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote a classic when they wrote ‘Positioning.’ The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. – Rating: 5 Stars
- All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All – Probably Seth Godin’s best book on marketing. All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true. – Rating: 5 Stars
- Guerrilla Marketing – When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinson’s philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. – Rating: 5 Stars
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! – Al Ries and Jack Trout bring us a classic on the rules of how to market. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Ries and Trout offer a compendium of twenty-two innovative rules for understanding and succeeding in the international marketplace. From the Law of Leadership, to The Law of the Category, to The Law of the Mind, these valuable insights stand the test of time and present a clear path to successful products. Violate them at your own risk. – Rating: 4 Stars
- Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth – Talk Triggers is the definitive, practical guide on how to use bold operational differentiators to create customer conversations, written by best-selling authors and marketing experts Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin. Word of mouth is directly responsible for 19% of all purchases, and influences as much as 90%. Every human on earth relies on word of mouth to make buying decisions. – Rating: 4 Stars
- Marketing Rebellion – MARKETING REIMAGINED. Are you overwhelmed by the breathtaking rate of change in the business world? Are confusing consumer trends, the unrelenting pace of technology, and the breakneck speed of digital marketing making you feel irrelevant and lost? Path-finding author Mark Schaefer provides an achievable and realistic framework to help you stay ahead of the curve by re-imagining marketing in a world where hyper-empowered consumers drive the business results. – Rating: 4 Stars
- Marketing for Dummies – Jeannette McMurtry brings us the dummies series on marketing (2017). Marketing For Dummies, 5th Edition is the ultimate handbook for boosting your business. Whether you’re a small mom-and-pop shop, a local nonprofit, or a mid-size business looking to grow, the right marketing approach can make your company or organization stand out from the crowd. This book shows you how to find, reach, and engage with your customers in a way that brings in business. This new edition, updated to align with the latest marketing revolution, introduces you to essential techniques including search engine, guerilla, global, and behavior marketing. – Rating: 4 Stars
- Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising – Ryan Holiday brings us a primer on all aspects of marketing. A new generation of megabrands like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitter haven’t spent a dime on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they rely on a new strategy—growth hacking—to reach many more people despite modest marketing budgets. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions. – Rating: 4 Stars
- This is Marketing – Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, and timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or an executive at a large corporation. Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. – Rating: 3 Stars
- Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too – Four-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk offers new lessons and inspiration drawn from the experiences of dozens of influencers and entrepreneurs who rejected the predictable corporate path in favor of pursuing their dreams by building thriving businesses and extraordinary personal brands. In his 2009 international bestseller Crush It, Gary insisted that a vibrant personal brand was crucial to entrepreneurial success, In Crushing It!, Gary explains why that’s even more true today, offering his unique perspective on what has changed and what principles remain timeless. – Rating: 2 Stars
A Strategy for Using Books on Marketing (or not)
Ok, before you buy all the Marketing books. Step back for a moment, and think about the big picture. Do you want to just read books on marketing, or do you want to ‘do’ marketing? Many of the books on this list are what I would call “mind candy.” They get you EXCITED about marketing but often leave you hanging in terms of what you can do. So yes read them. But then turn them into practical marketing for your small business.
