You’ve spent years practicing, learning, training, and working to refine your techniques to sell the best product or service you can. You value quality, you value your customers, and you continue to wake up every day to run an honest business. Welcome to the world of small business and entrepreneurship. You’ve made a humongous leap, and the grind continues.
Beware!
Before diving into marketing books and searching for answers to your problems, it’s best to be intentional about which books you pick. Business and marketing are religions to many people (me included); they come with rituals, obligations, and rules for life. This means most marketing books will be interpretations of the author’s view of marketing, and you are also subject to their intentions, whether wholesome or malicious.
All of the books I’m going to recommend to you I’ve read front to back, and all of the books listed below have given me a boost during my career as a small business owner of a local catering company.
Be intentional when you pick up a marketing book. Sometimes, you might stumble upon a few gems on accident, but to get the most out of a book, you want to have a specific objective. This will yield results the fastest; if you pick a random marketing book at Barnes and Noble, it’s more like you end up with a junk book with a few good nuggets than you are likely to find a book with the exact answer you need.
As a result, you will waste time thumbing through pages of the book and spewing the author’s personal ideologies rather than substantive information. For example, in the book “How to Make a Million Dollars with Your Ideas,” I only read 3 or 4 times before it inspired an idea I could actually apply. That day, I took action!
My business has been in a rut for a few months, and I needed a way to convert more of my leads into sales quickly. The idea was to provide customers with a Personal Guarantee i.e., “Love it or we will give you your money back.” I didn’t have the money or confidence for such a salacious offer, but I could offer “Guaranteed On Time delivery or your money back” for my catering services.
This offer built trust with my audience, and in 3 years, I only had to do 2 refunds. Additionally, it was great for my ROI because I didn’t need to spend more money on advertising; I only needed to tweak the wording on all of my current advertising.
Top 10 Books on Marketing
Contagious – Best Overall Marketing Book (Social Currency – Word of Mouth)
Purple Cow – Best Book to find your audience in marketing and advertising
Unreasonable Marketing – Best Book to create Unique Selling Propositions (USP)
The 22 immutable laws of branding – Best High-level marketing book
How to make a million dollars with your ideas – Best Book brainstorm marketing ideas
Invisible Influence – Best Book to understand your audience
The Magic of Thinking Big – Best Marketing book when starting your business
The Toyota Way – Best book for long-term thinking
The Power of Broke – Best book for new entrepreneurs
The One Device – Best Book to see the big picture in a complex business
Time for a boost!!!
Contagious – Best Overall Marketing Book (Social Currency – Word of Mouth)
by Jonah Berger
Most small businesses are built on ‘word of mouth’ because there’s usually no marketing budget in your first few years. Contagious will help you supercharge your word of mouth. It’s easy to take word-of-mouth advertising for granted. Your slaving away at creating the building itself and seeing the big picture is damn near impossible sometimes. In this book, Jonah Berger gives examples of how other businesses use word-of-mouth to their advantage.
Purple Cow – Best Book to find your audience in marketing and advertising
by Seth Godin
You know how great your business is. Your products are helpful and high quality, and your services are meticulous and detailed, but sales don’t reflect your time and effort. The odds are you aren’t standing out from the pack enough to get people’s attention. In this book, Seth Godin explains the value of standing out and not being forgotten.
Unreasonable Marketing – Best Book to create Unique Selling Propositions (USP)
by Will Guidara
3 or 4 people recommended this book to me before I picked it up. The idea of taking my marketing to an unreasonable level sounded exhausting. Once I started reading it, I realized the examples were indeed unreasonable but highlighted the value of all the small details. If you execute them well and consistently, small details can improve customer retention and create new USPs for you to use in your marketing.
The 22 immutable laws of branding – Best Book for Branding
by Al Ries
To all my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed entrepreneurs, you will be tempted to pick this book up first, and it certainly has a lot of valuable high-level information. It analyzes branding triumphs and fails of large corporations like Chevrolet, Kleenex, and Pepsi. However, the tactics of a billion-dollar corporation will not necessarily translate to small or medium-sized businesses because we often have to be more aggressive with our marketing tactics. However, if you’re at your business’s branding or rebranding stage or planning a long-term marketing strategy, I recommend you pick this book up.
How to Make Millions with Your Ideas – Best Book brainstorm marketing ideas
This book provides dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of businesses that succeeded with a lot of good planning and hard work behind a great idea. I’ve already praised this book earlier, but my only warning is not to be so caught up in the hype of a good idea that you neglect the finer details of your business. My catering business was already generating $300k a year when I picked up this book, which highlights how this book is great for newbies and more advanced business owners.
Invisible Influence – Best Book to Understand Your Audience
by Jonah Berger
In the age of social media, it’s harder than ever to find your audience niche. Deciding who to sell your product to is often more difficult than trying to convince them to buy your product. The next step is monitoring your audience’s behavior because once you find them, it’s valuable to understand what tactics you can employ to bring them closer and what tactics you can avoid pushing them away.
The Magic of Thinking Big – Best Marketing book when starting your business
Whether you were a sheltered kid from a small town or spent too many years working in an office, you could use some help thinking big when you start, and this book can provide some needed perspective on how much bigger your idea can be. By the time I picked up this book, I was three years deep in my entrepreneurial journey, and the perspective it provided for me wasn’t new. If you’re starting out and need some help with imagination, this could help.
The Toyota Way – Best book for long-term thinking
Not exactly a marketing book, but a slow and steady approach to growing your business is always a good option. Consistent growth, even slowly, will provide a solid foundation for your businesses. You will accumulate resources, status, and a positive reputation over time to the point where a great marketing campaign is the cherry on top. For companies like Toyota, their marketing strategy was their reputation for quality, attention to detail, and consistency. You will be marketing only via word of mouth if your customer retention and satisfaction are second to no one. Your marketing budget will go into maintaining your quality and, in turn, your reputation.
The Power of Broke – Best book for new entrepreneurs
by Daymond John
Once, people around me saw that I was the “real deal” when it came to entrepreneurship, a business that generated enough income to pay its own bills. People will get curious and ask you what you did, and there’s a good chance they will tell you about their journey and why they haven’t succeeded. If your revenue is $0 and your primary reason is lack of money, this book is for you. This book could also be an excellent gift for someone who is an aspiring entrepreneur and give them a little boost. The old saying “It takes money to make money” is, in fact, true, but it’s not true 100% of the time. If you want to start a business, you can do dozens of tasks that require little to no money. Start a social media page, network, talk to suppliers, work out of your home, and open a bank account. Selling is not expensive; the only cost is the product or service and your time.
The One Device – Best Book for Abstract Thinkers
Once you’re ready to start outlining your marketing campaign, you will need to tell a story, draw people in, and tell them why your business is magical. To do this, you must have a big picture of your business. The one device is about the entire logistical timeline of the iPhone, from research and development to the gold they mine in Africa to use in the phone. A device so magnificent it changed the world. A brainchild of hundreds of engineers, developers, and Steve Jobs. This book is great for my more technical readers. It’s not directly about marketing, so it won’t lay out the answer for you. It’s how the iPhone changed the world, and I can’t think of a better gold standard.
Bonus: The 4 Hour Work Week
I hesitated to name this book because achieving the 4-hour workweek requires much more effort than you realize. The concept is fantastic, and I love Tim Ferris’s podcast. Most successful entrepreneurs will become prisoners of their businesses. If your business lacks systems and infrastructure, it will be impossible for you to work less than 40 hours a week without your business starting to crumble, let alone only 4 hours a week. It is not a great read for marketing, but it is a great read for building systems.
If you successfully market your business, you will need as much infrastructure and systems as possible.
Now get out there and be Great!
