Katy Perry is not necessarily everyone’s idea of a musician, but she is the epitome of an excellent marketer. By knowing her consumer base she is consistently able to brand her image to their liking. Ms. Perry is also able to manage both traditional and social media outlets to a point where even Bing Crosby fans know and listen to her music. But whether or not you’re a Katy Perry fan, if you need a bit of help either creating your own brand image or marketing yourself to the top of the corporate ladder, here are 10 of the best marketing books to help.
1. 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More — by Perry Marshall forward by Richard Koch
If you’ve been in the corporate world, or had some kind of business experience, you’ve hear of the 80/20 rule — 20% of the people accomplish 80% of the work. Marshall’s book takes this adlibbed truism and shows you how to apply it to “almost anything you can measure in a business.”
2. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users — by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick
Kawasaki’s book is written to help you learn how to “rock social media.” And unless you’ve been living with the Flintstones in the Rock Age, you know that all businesses require a social media platform. This books helps you to empower social media to help you past just the basics of blogging and Tweeting.
3. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How To Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World: by Gary Vaynerchuck
Because, “social media is no longer just pulling the audience away from traditional marketing; it’s cannibalizing digital media, too,” Vaynerchuck’s book has become an important guide in how to marry communication and content to attain stellar results.
4. The Power of Visual Story Telling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand – by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio
“Images don’t just paint a thousand words. They can communicate something far more specific than words — specific emotions, specific feelings, specific moods, things that are almost impossible to convey using words.” Amen.
5. What Great Brands Do:The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best From the Rest — by Denise Lee Yohn
While it is definitely true that rapid advancements in technology over the past ten years have changed much of how business is conducted, one thing has not changed — companies still need to have a positive a brand image. Much like Johnson & Johnson — who has not only managed to overcome some very difficult situations, but has also managed maintain its status as a household name, much because of its well formed credo – Yohn’s book “is an examination of how great brands manage to avoid the fate of Kodiak and other faded companies by using their brands as management tools to fuel, align, and guide every person in the organization and every task they undertake.”
6. Triggers: 30 Sales Tools you can use to Control the Mind of your Prospect to Motivate, Influence and Persuade — by Joseph Sugarman
Even though we live in a technologically advance world, in sales and marketing you cannot ignore the basics of the human psyche. Take QVC – owned by Liberty Media Corporation — for example. QVC has done an excellent job of creating a calamity which triggers consumers to buy something they don’t want or need just because of how the QVC salesperson presents the items. Sugarman’s book delves deep into the psyche to show you how “using a trigger and changing just a few words” can create a huge response to your product or service.
7. Decoding the New Consumer Mind: How and Why We Shop and Buy — by Kit Yarrow
As people have become more consumed with technology, they have become less focused on human interaction: increasing everyday anxiety and definitively changing consumer behavior. Yarrow very cleverly focuses on “three fast-developing sociocultural shifts, each reinforced by the others, have transformed customers over the last decade,” and teaches you “four marketing strategies on how to meet them.”
8. Hooked: How to Build Habit- Forming Products — by Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover
Human beings are creatures of habit. Think about it, this morning on your way to work you probably stopped by a Starbucks to purchase an over priced morning jolt of java. You probably didn’t even think of going to another coffee spot — and thus Starbucks has successfully mastered a “habit-forming product-design” which “makes their goods indispensable.” Eyal’s book very cleverly teaches you how to trigger the mind into believing you or your product is indispensable.
9. Ultimate Guide to Google Ad Words: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes — by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd
You can’t have a top 10 Best Marketing Books list without a book about Google — yawn. However, the best thing about Marshall and Todd’s book is that is very easy to follow and specifically teaches you how to used Google to your advantage whether you’re just beginning your Google experience or you’re well versed with Google. And just as a reminder, “Google gets searched more than 1 billion times everyday. That’s 720,000 searches a minute. Google can bring thousands of visitors to your website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year…whether you’re taking a shower, eating breakfast, driving to work, picking up your kids at school, taking a phone call, sleeping, sitting on the commode, daydreaming, busting your butt to beat a deadline, chasing some customer, typing an email message…And it all can happen on autopilot : 100 percent predictable and completely consistent, like clockwork.”
10. The 60-Second Sales Hook: How To Stand Out And Sell More Using the Power Of Your Story — by Kevin Rogers
Back in the day, when I was working in marketing – insert RUN DMC song here — one of my mentors told me we are all story tellers. If we tell a good story, then we will get good results. If we tell a bad story, then we will not get such good results. This is the premise of Roger’s book, that “when your selling your product, the best story to tell is your own.” Roger’s teaches you how to sell by using your own story — well.
Featured photo credit: Fotocitizen via pixabay.com
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