11 Digital Marketing & Sales Books You Must Read Today

It’s often thought that digital marketing books are outdated and that only blogs are worth reading, but that’s not true at all.

Both types of content can offer quality texts and help marketers to grow their businesses.

The truth is that blogs usually have more up-to-date content, but books are great when it comes to understanding the nature of marketing, sales, and business in general.

Also, books help a lot in increasing the quality of your blog posts because they raise your knowledge.

That’s why in this blog post I want to share with you books that everyone is interested in digital marketing should read.

Let’s discover the books.

#1 Content That Converts: How To Build A Profitable and Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy - Laura Hanly

This book is for B2B business owners who are interested in building a powerful lead generation system through content marketing.

Every successful marketer knows that B2B companies who write a blog generate more leads than those who don’t.

The book has 12 chapters and 114 pages which means that it can be read within a day or two. That’s very important because business owners are very busy these days.

Content That Converts will teach you how to create long-form content assets such as eBooks and courses that establish you as an industry leader.

Furthermore, you’ll learn about doing a keyword research and what’s more, how to distribute your content with email marketing.

You probably already know that email marketing has the highest ROI.

Next, it will learn you about distributing your content with SEO. This means you’ll learn how to do a keyword research, how to write posts that Google love, and so on.

#2 Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses - Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and podcaster. He’s the founder of many start-ups and one of the most successful is Content Marketing Institute.

Content Inc. learns you building a content empire in six steps:

1. The Sweet Spot
2. The Content Tilt
3. Building the Base
4. Harvesting Audience
5. Diversification
6. Monetization

Your first step is to figure out what’re you really good at. What knowledge and skills you have? Your content must be outstanding and that’s the reason why you need to pick a niche that you’re familiar with.

Next, you have to build the base on the platform where your content will be published (blog, YouTube, podcasts, etc).

The fourth step is converting one-time visitors into ongoing subscribers such as newsletter subscription, following on social media, and so on.

The fifth step is launching additional platforms - additional blogs, YouTube channels and things like that.

Finally, the last step is to generate revenue from the base you’ve built.

#3 How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System for More Sales, to More Customers, More Often - Ray Edwards

A copy is a piece of content whose goal is to increase brand awareness and persuade a person or group to take a particular action.

That action is mostly generating a lead or converting into customers. This book has 185 pages or 12 chapters, and it will learn you how to write a copy that sells, step by step.

The book will be particularly useful to copywriters and other content creators because it teaches you how to write effectively.

Forget everything you learned in school. Writing effectively means writing simple, easy to read texts with active voice and encouraging tone. The goal is to provide great user experience.

You’ll achieve that when visitors feel comfortable while reading your texts. In this book you’ll discover different copywriting techniques that you can apply in various situations including sending emails, writing on websites, writing on social media and more.

Invest your time in reading this book, and you’ll save much more time when you implement the copywriting knowledge you got.

#4 The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales - Chris Smith

Many successful entrepreneurs recommend this book claiming that The Conversion Code is a must-have.

One of them is a digital marketing heavyweight, Neil Patel. He is the co-founder of many startups and when says that if you need more traffic, leads, and sales, then you need this book, then you should consider getting it.

There are other big names like Oli Gardner, Unbounce co-founder, who also recommends this book.

With so many options in front of the consumers, capturing their attention is a critical moment in marketing.

That’s exactly what this book is all about. It’s a guide how to get the leads, convert them into appointments and finally close the process of getting new customers.

Traditional marketing is over. Now we are talking about customers that spend their time on social media, browsing the Internet, checking their emails and more, using their smartphones.

All that is a great chance for marketers, and I dare to say that we are living in the golden era of digital marketing.

The Conversion code is the book to help you enjoy all the benefits of digital marketing.

#5 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More - Perry Marshall

Vilfredo Pareto was a very smart guy. He’s the one who invented 80/20 Rule which we usually call Pareto Principle.

The concept is very simple - whatever you do, 80% results will be from 20% efforts. Here are some examples:

• 80% of your sales come from 20% clients
• 20% of the code has 80% of the errors
• 80% of sales are from 20% of advertising

In this book, Perry Marshall will learn you how to work less and make more by applying the Pareto Principle to:

• Time wasters
• Locating invisible profit centers in your company
• Advertising to responsive buyers
• Using Google AdWords
• Hiring and Outsourcing

and many other topics.

#6 SEO 2017: Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies - Adam Clarke

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has dramatically changed in the last few years. What used to work a few years ago, doesn’t work today.

SEO 2017 is updated to cover the latest changes to Google’s algorithm. You can apply them without worrying that you’re applying outdated tactics.

Natural backlinks are the most important Google ranking factor. Fortunately, there’s a whole chapter that will teach you different link building strategies in 2017.

Furthermore, you’ll learn about keyword research because obviously, you want to find the keyword that will convert. Having lots of visitors who don’t convert is useless.

Also, you’ll get the list of 25+ tools that digital marketers use to automate their SEO, so they can save your time and achieve better results.

This book is definitely good both for inexperienced and experienced digital marketers because you’ll definitely read something that you haven’t know before.

If you ever get penalized by Google (I hope you won’t), you’ll go through a very difficult and stressful period, but no worries, this book will teach you how to recover from the penalty.

#7 Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide for Starting Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, E-Mail, and Cold Calling - Jeb Blount

Fill your pipeline because empty pipeline is the main reason for failure in sales says Jeb Blount, author of the book. But filling the pipeline alone is not enough. You have to keep it full.

Among many helpful things you’ll learn:

• The 30-day rule
• Law of Replacements
• Law of Familiarity
• The 5 C’s of Social Selling

and much more.

According to the author of the book, this is a new approach that works perfectly with the real people and real projects.

The book is about the sales and for the sales people. You can consider this as a guide to make everything more including, more leads and eventually more sales.

Like most of the books from this list Fanatical Prospecting is also available in an audio format which can be really refreshing, because you probably spend a lot of time reading regular stuff.

#8 Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com - Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler

Almost 15 years ago, Aaron Ross was experimenting with cold calling and sending cold emails.

After the hard work and a lot of patience, he figured out that decision maker is not the best person to make initial conversation.

So how he found the best person for conversation?

He sends non-salesy emails to other people, asking in a short and sweet way to point him to that person. A mind blowing results followed and Cold Calling 2.0 process was born.

All these years later, this approach is still working. The big name of Salesforce should be enough to stop questioning that.

In this book, you’ll find a many useful stuff to help you come close to the 9% of response rate that authors of the book claim achievable.

For startups, it may seem costly to hire a sales rep at the beginning, but you have prepared because that time may come sooner than you think.

#9 The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd - Allan Dib

Do you really need a marketing plan to succeed in business? Absolutely. Does it take a lot of time and knowledge to create one? Not at all. Can I do it for myself? You can and you should. How? Just learn to fulfill nine squares on the page.

After reading this book you’ll be able to create and map your own 1-page marketing plan. Following the big business marketing plans can be lethal to your business.

What works for big businesses doesn’t work well, or doesn’t work at all for small businesses. The book is very well organized with no unnecessary extra material, that authors often use to fill the space.

Here, everything is simple, helpful and effective. Just like your marketing plan will be.

#10 High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results - Mark Hunter

This book is focused on cold calling and prospecting like the title says. The process of prospecting maybe something else than you think.

Too many people think that Internet changed the sales process in a way that you don’t need cold calling anymore.

This totally misses the point. Digital age did improve marketing drastically, but some rules stayed the same. Sales before everything else.

All those decisive things in sales like timing, voice, words, messages are covered in this book. You’ll also learn about finding better leads, making compelling emails, using social media efficiently and much more.

In sales, there are no shortcuts. With the realistic approach, Mark Hunter points out to the most important things in sales. For everyone engaged in sales, this book is a must have.    

#11 Hustle: The Power to Charge Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum Hardcover - Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskovits, and Jonas Koffler

Unless you never heard anything about content marketing than you must know who Neil Patel is. The same goes for Patrick Vlaskovits and Jonas Koffler.

Maybe you expect to see text similar to Neil Patel regular blog posts. It’s nothing like that.

Words in this book are more inspirational and motivational because they talk more about dreaming your own dreams and changing your habits and things like that.

As I said the authors of the book are very successful so I think that their experience can be the most valuable to anyone who is interested in digital marketing.

The fact that Neil Patel, who published a couple of blog posts every week, wrote a book, tells you that you need to consider reading books about digital marketing and sales.

Conclusion

You probably follow several bloggers and read articles they write. Who doesn’t?

However, reading books is something else. For instance, you’ll usually read a book from different authors, although there are exceptions like Neil Patel who is one of the authors of recommended books. In books, you can go more in details and get the deeper knowledge.

Digital marketing and sales are full of potential themes for the books. While it’s necessary to keep up with trends, there are skills, techniques, and knowledge applicable for a long term.

This the reason why I think that blogs and books are different, equally important parts of the same picture.