Here are my 5 favorite from the past year:
1. Momentum: How to Propel Your Marketing and Transform Your Brand in the Digital Age
Offering five essential principles that crack the code on marketing successfully in today’s ecosystem, Momentum: How to Propel Your Marketing and Transform Your Brand in the Digital Age will help you not only regain your sanity, but learn how to spot opportunities to grow your organization and brand in the midst of marketplace chaos.
In Momentum, Shama Hyder draws on her experience guiding clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100s to demystify the marketing landscape and provide you with the digital foresight you need to operate effectively in an increasingly digital world. Using key principles, she demonstrates how to transform your current approach into an effective, struggle-free, ROI-driven strategy.
2. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.
If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.
In Everybody Writes, top marketing veteran Ann Handley gives expert guidance and insight into the process and strategy of content creation, production and publishing, with actionable how-to advice designed to get results.
These lessons and rules apply across all of your online assets — like web pages, home page, landing pages, blogs, email, marketing offers, and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media. Ann deconstructs the strategy and delivers a practical approach to create ridiculously compelling and competent content.
3. #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness
The New York Times bestselling author draws from his popular show #AskGaryVee to offer surprising, often outrageous, and imminently useful and honest answers to everything you’ve ever wanted to know—and more—about navigating the new world.
Gary Vaynerchuk—the inspiring and unconventional entrepreneur who introduced us to the concept of crush it—knows how to get things done, have fun, and be massively successful. A marketing and business genius, Gary had the foresight to go beyond traditional methods and use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to reach an untapped audience that continues to grow.
#AskGaryVee showcases the most useful and interesting questions Gary has addressed on his popular show. Distilling and expanding on the podcast’s most urgent and evergreen themes, Gary presents practical, timely, and timeless advice on marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and everything else you’ve been afraid to ask but are dying to know.
4. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer shows exactly how to deal with both groups, drawing on meticulously researched case studies from businesses of all types and sizes from around the world. It includes specific playbooks and formulas as well as a fold-out poster of “the Hatrix,” which summarizes the best strategies for different situations. The book is also filled with poignant and hilarious examples of haters gone wild, and companies gone crazy, as well as inspirational stories of companies responding with speed, compassion, and humanity.
Whether you work for a mom-and-pop store or a global brand, you will have haters—and you can’t afford to ignore them. Baer’s insights and tactics will teach you how to embrace complaints, put haters to work for you, and turn bad news into good outcomes.
5. Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses
In Content Inc., one of today's most sought-after content-marketing strategists reveals a new model for entrepreneurial success. Simply put, it's about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience.
Notice a shift?
Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It's a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds.
The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective. And best of all, it works. It's a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine's list of fastest growing private companies for three years straight. It's also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you'll be able to sell pretty much anything you want.
Do you have any favorite marketing books you would like to share? Leave your favorite in the comment section below.
