10 Marketing Books to Add to Your Holiday Gift List
1. Youtility: Why Smart Companies Are Helping, Not Selling
As Jay Baer discusses, “The difference between helping and selling is just 2 letters. But those letters make all the difference. Your company needs to become a YOUtility. Sell something and you make a customer. Help someone and you make a customer for life.” The book advocates a marketing strategy that creates devoted customers by providing something to them which is genuinely and inherently useful.
2. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break Through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less
In today’s age, when customers are very connected and aware about the latest products, services and tools in the market, you can’t interrupt them with mediocre or irrelevant content or sales pitches—they simply switch off! Joe Pulizzi is one of the world’s leading experts on content marketing and he explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information with which they actually want to engage. The book is an excellent guide to get all the tools to start creating and disseminating content that leads directly to greater profits and growth. Joe Pulizzi emphasizes we focus far too much on channels first: from blogs and Facebook to Pinterest and all the others out there today, but content marketing is about the context, customer and relevance that matters.
3. Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
This book is packed with straightforward advice and great humor. Andy Sernovitz asks a simple question, “What would people prefer—Love or Money?” He answers that you can buy advertising, which is paying people to talk about you. But when you earn word of mouth, people talk out of love rather than money. And this love grows and builds over time. Your cost of customer acquisition starts to drop as your fans and followers bring in new customers for free. Great companies reinvest these savings into more reasons to talk, which begins to snowball into an unbeatable competitive advantage that carries them through both good times and bad.
