Helen’s Top 10 Marketing Books

To be really good at something you need to be continuously studying. This is especially important in business, to keep you ahead of the game and ahead of the competition. We know that as a busy business owner, your time is precious, so here are Helen’s top 10 marketing books to ensure you’re expertise in marketing.

4 Hour Work Week – Tim Ferriss

One of the most well known guides in business today, the 4-Hour Workweek is the manifesto of a new and better worldview. This book delves into a profoundly transformational shift that is the antithesis to some of modern society’s most entrenched and pervasive assumptions about the way life is and will be.

Some aspects of this novel are pervasive in life today such outsourcing much of your work overseas while many techniques are still elusive to many.

Micro Marketing: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small – Greg Verdino.

Every day the world sees 1 million new blog posts, tens of millions of tweets, hundreds of millions of new pieces of Facebook content, and more than 1 billion YouTube videos.

microMARKETING empowers you to rethink, retool, and revitalize your marketing strategies to take full advantage of the opportunities created by the microcontent explosion. A pioneer in the world of microcontent marketing, Greg Verdino helps you create a strategy that emphasizes relationships over reach, interaction over interruption, and social networking over broadcast networks.

Blue Ocean Strategy. How to create uncontested Market Space and make the competition irrelevant – W. Cham Kim and Renèe Mauborgne.

This international bestseller challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success.

Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet, as this influential and immensely popular book shows, these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future.

Fish. A remarkable way to Boost Moral and Improve results – Stephen C. Lundin, Ph. D., Harry Paul, and John Christensen.

Here’s another management parable that draws its lesson from an unlikely source–this time it’s the fun-loving fishmongers at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In Fish! the heroine, Mary Jane Ramirez, recently widowed and mother of two, is asked to engineer a turnaround of her company’s troubled operations department, a group that authors Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen describe as a “toxic energy dump.”

Most reasonable heads would cut their losses and move on. Why bother with this bunch of losers? But the authors don’t make it so easy for Mary Jane. Instead, she’s left to sort out this mess with the help of head fishmonger Lonnie. Based on a bestselling corporate education video, Fish! aims to help employees find their way to a fun and happy workplace.

The 22 immutable Laws of Marketing.Violate Them at Your Own Risk! – Al Ries and Jack Trout.

As Al Ries and Jack Trout—the world-renowned marketing consultants and bestselling authors of Positioning—note, you can build an impressive air plane, but it will never leave the ground if you ignore the laws of physics, especially gravity. Why then, they ask, shouldn’t there also be laws of marketing that must be followed to launch and maintain winning brands?

In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Ries and Trout offer a compendium of twenty-two innovative rules for understanding and succeeding in the international marketplace. From the Law of Leadership, to The Law of the Category, to The Law of the Mind, these valuable insights stand the test of time and present a clear path to successful products.

The E-Myth. Why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it – Michael E. Gerber.

E-Myth \ ‘e-,’mith\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work.

Words that Sell – Richard Bayan.

Looking for a better way to say “authentic?” Words That Sell gives you 57 alternatives. How about “appealing?” Take your pick from 76 synonyms. You’ll even find more than 100 variations on “exciting.” Fully updated and expanded, this edition of the copy writing classic is packed with inspiration-on-demand for busy professionals who need to win customers–by mail, online, or in person.

Your Marketing Sucks – Paul Stevens.

Stop throwing thousand-dollar bills out the window and camouflaging spending as marketing demand that the money spent on marketing bring in more money in return. Cut through the myths that claim marketing is about advertising, public relations, or direct mail, and learn that it is about growing the revenue, profit, and valuation of the business.

Fire your advertising agency if it even thinks about applying for a Clio or other creative award. Implement the marketing moratorium and stop all marketing until you know how each component of your program justifies itself in dollars and cents.

Marketing Made Easy – Synthesis Marketing

Here at Synthesis Marketing we spend a lot of time with our clients getting back to basics. And, that’s exactly what Marketing Made Easy is going to teach you to do. Too often we get asked ‘why isn’t my marketing strategy working?’ And, more often than not, it’s because people spend their marketing budget on the ‘tools’ they think will get their marketing done.

Marketing Tactics that Work – Synthesis Marketing

This Workbook is a great follow on from Marketing Made Easy. In Marketing Made Easy we brought you back to marketing basics and showed you how a solid marketing strategy is built on setting objectives, knowing and targeting your customers and identifying your way to stand out from the crowd. With a clear strategy in place now it’s time to learn about the tactics that will help you get the job done.

We know it’s a little cheeky to put two of our marketing books own in here. But to be honest we use them EVERY day! If you’d like to learn in a more social environment, Helen Down, runs practical workshops. Being in the room with other businesses and being able ask any question is something you won’t experience from reading any book.