For many this time of year is great for kicking back, celebrating the annual accomplishments of your team, and marking the moment with some downtime. We’ve complied a list of books for the marketer looking for resources to inspire and recharge strategy for 2015 and beyond. Check them out!
1. Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies that Drive Results – By Ardath Albee
With complex sales cycles often extending into years, maintaining long-term relevance requires both strategic planning and dynamic adaptability. The book provides techniques and advice marketers need to match content to context and respond to constantly shifting markets. Albee outlines clear-cut strategies for developing customer-oriented communications, identifying the distinct value that differentiates your company, and making the shift from singular communications to a continuum approach that aligns outcomes to business objectives. The book will be available January 6.
2. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content – By Ann Handley
In marketing (and elsewhere) everybody writes. We emphasize the power of a solid story to support our brand’s identity, and to help us connect with our audiences in a way that’s helpful, meaningful, and even spirited. Regardless of your organization’s makeup, everybody is challenged to embody the skills and tasks of the content role. The book offers viable advice written in a clever and accessible tone to foster a proactive writing environment for your team, develop your brand’s point of view, and improve your ability to empathize with your audiences.
3. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less – By Joe Pulizzi
This book encourages marketers to implement an audience-first strategy to answer the age-old question: How does effective content marketing help companies drive meaningful relationships to grow and engage with your target audiences? Pulizzi offers real world examples of both B2B and B2C companies leveraging smart content marketing to drive real business. The book also offers 6 Principles of Content Marketing, including “Avoid Sales Speak,” a must for all marketers committed to providing truly engaging and helpful content. This book is a great resource for examples and for help in getting your documented strategy off the ground, starting with a mission statement.
4. Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype – By Jay Baer
Consumers today gravitate toward resources and brands that provide information and value beyond the transaction. And as noted in this book, “The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.” Baer offers a new marketing model for the age of information overload, to get marketers thinking about how they can actually drive sales by focusing on offering service to help and enable customers. This book provides help-based case study examples to inspire your next relationship-building touch point.
5. QR Code Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business Into the Ground – By Scott Stratten
Because we could really use a helpful list of the things we should NOT be doing, this book surfaces the faux pas standing in the way of success. The content is presented in several sections, each including a story related to the topic, as well as tips and explanations on what not to do. A little reverse psychology can do the marketer good. In his book bio Stratten explains, “If you knew that your terrible business decisions could cost a kitten its life, would you still do it? Of course not. No one wants to hurt a kitten, and no one wants to damage their own business through easily avoidable mistakes. The trick is, knowing which things are the wrong things to do.”
What’s on your winter break reading list?
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