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Best Marketing Strategy Books you need to read in 2021

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Whether you are just beginning your journey through the Digital Marketing world and want to get a better understanding of the concepts of marketing or what to expect when you choose a digital marketing agency, or you are already in the field for some time and you want to get new ideas about how you can grow your business, you can always count on books. Putting together valuable insights into just one read, you can learn a lot from the years of experience of the authors and reinforce your marketing strategy.

Here are some of the best marketing & marketing strategy books for you to read in 2021.

This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin

It is only natural to start this list with the marketing guru. Famous for his innovative thinking and game-changing approach that gets the heart of great marketing, Seth Godin distillates his work into a single, digestible volume. “This is Marketing’’ is essentially a culmination of his wisdom from his lifetime in marketing, but, rather than giving technical advice, Godin’s writing is broader and philosophical. The book addresses topics like the history of marketing and how mass media is less and less relevant or necessary in the digital marketing age. 

While the digital spaces are often fast-moving and tactical, Seth Godin’s advice is more timeless and general. The core of his philosophy is about reframing marketing as “doing work that matters for people who care”. You’ll be guided through how to identify your target market, how to engage with them by building trust and how to make the buying choice feel as good for them as it does for you.

Invisible Selling Machine: 5 Steps To Crafting an Automated Evergreen Email Campaign That Makes Money While You Sleep by Ryan Deiss

In his book, entrepreneur Ryan Deiss walks you through all 5 phases of crafting an automated, evergreen email campaign that makes sales while you sleep, and shows how each step can be automated and perpetuated to invisibly convert strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into raving fans. Whether you’re starting with an email list of zero or you have 100,000+ emails, the Invisible Selling Machine will take you through a blueprint to perfect the email marketing sales funnel. 

If you haven’t cracked the code to making money online with your product or service, start with email marketing. It may seem like an already outdated tool, but you would be surprised to know that it has the greatest ROI, and is not that difficult to use once you get familiar with it.


The Age of Influence: The power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand by Neal Schaffer

We are currently living in the Evolving Age of the Influencer Era. If today’s brands want to succeed, they have to be in the conversation, and influencers is a way of making that happen. “The Age of Influence” is an essential guide for marketing professionals and business owners who want to create and integrate an effective, creative, and sustainable influencer marketing strategy.

In his book, Neal Schaffer teaches entrepreneurs, marketing executives, and cutting-edge agencies how to:

  • Identify, approach, and engage the right influencers for their brand or product.

  • Determine what resources to put behind influencer campaigns.

  • Manage the business side of influencer marketing, including tools that will help measure ROI.

  • Develop their brand’s social media voice to become an influencer in its own right.

Give it a read and see how you can make use of all these opportunities.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert

If you want to make your business the next Spotify, Netflix or Audible, this book is your first step into subscription-based sales. We’ve all seen the explosion of subscription-based companies and witnessed the evolution of marketing on platforms like Spotify or YouTube. Today’s customers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of maintenance, from transportation (Uber, Surf Air), to clothing (Stitch Fix, Eleven James).

For web marketers, this book is a fascinating insight into the shift for consumers wanting access instead of ownership. Tzuo and Weisert show how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. Some of the case studies include brands like Adobe, Fender and Caterpillar. In Subscribed, you’ll learn how these companies made the shift from selling to getting subscribers, and how you can transform your own product into a valuable service with a practical, step-by-step framework.

Overdeliver: Build a Business For a Lifetime playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing by Brian Kurtz

According to Brian Kurtz, marketing is not everything. It’s the only thing. Digital marketing and digital marketing agencies, especially, have become increasingly popular among entrepreneurs, particularly in today’s market. In the world of marketing, Kurtz has seen it all and done it all over almost four decades. He lives by the philosophy “Those who did it have a responsibility to teach it”. 

So, if you have a vision or a mission in life, why not share it with millions? And while you share it, why not measure everything and make all of your marketing accountable? This is what the book is all about. Of course, alongside reading this you should also make some research to get familiar with the basic concepts and vocabulary of digital marketing and see what digital marketing services you can benefit from. Still, whether you’re a newcomer or a seasoned professional, Overdelivered gives you a simple road map to grow your business, maximize your impact in your market, and love what you’re doing while you’re doing it. 


Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity by Scott Galloway

Outlining both the crisis and opportunity brought to light by the pandemic, Galloway discusses how the year 2020 has not been a change agent as much as an accelerant of trends that were already on the rise. Many marketing channels and tactics changed. Some businesses - like home exercise company Peloton, video conference software maker Zoom, and Amazon - woke up to find themselves crushed under an avalanche of consumer demand. Others - like the restaurant, travel, hospitality, and live entertainment industries - scrambled to escape obliteration.

From the best-selling author and NYU Business School, Professor Scot Galloway comes a keenly insightful, urgent analysis of who stands to win and who’s at risk to lose in a post-pandemic world. He outlines the contours of the crisis and the opportunities that lie ahead in marketing post-COVID.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings

From a DVD mailing service to a streaming superpower. Netflix chairman and CEO, Reed Hastings shares the secrets that have revolutionised the entertainment and tech industries. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.

The Tourist Magnet Formula: Transform your Hotel or Resort into a fully-booked tourist attraction using modern, practical Digital Marketing tools by Andrei Tiu 

Learn how to turn your Hotel Business into a highly popular international Tourist Attraction by creating a strong, recognizable brand and reaching the right customers through the right communications channel, with the right message. This book is aimed at helping industry professionals both with and without formal education or experience in Digital Marketing create and implement a Digital Strategy for their Hotel or Resort. Applied, the tools and tactics presented have the power to significantly contribute towards lead generation, an increased number of direct bookings, stronger brand identity and an increase in the average lifetime customer value – ultimately reflecting in higher profits and a thriving modern business.

“The Tourist Magnet Formula” also analyses the individual Marketing channels, such as:

Bonus!

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk by Al Ries and Jack Trout

There are laws of nature, so why shouldn't there be laws of marketing? This book is probably the shortest read on this list at only 143 pages, but it’s almost impossible to read through Al Ries and Jack Trout’s decades of wisdom and not come away with a few actionable insights. 

The advice in the book is more high level and less tactical, addressing challenges such as brand positioning (The Law Of The Category) and PR (The Law of Perception). One important thing to note is that many of the ideas in this book surround decisions that a company must make long before their product is released, as opposed to tactics applied after the fact to convince people to buy. Essentially, the laws in the book stress the importance of “product/market fit” long before it became the new buzzword.

It’s worth noting that the book was released in 1994, so many of the examples and advice may seem a bit dated. This puts it upon the reader to see how these ideas can be applied in the current age. For example, the Law of Focus discusses owning a word in your prospect’s mind, which is an idea that can be tied to modern SEO strategy.

Let’s get reading! 

After going through this list you are bound to have a much better approach on how to develop a marketing strategy for your business, what to expect from the post-pandemic market and what trends you should take on in 2021.