5 Best Marketing Books for Business

Ask a 100 different people what their favourite marketing books are and you’ll get 100 different answers. Therefore, this a list of books which I personally found useful and impactful.

Also, some of these books are not strictly just about marketing, but business principles and marketing in general, which are intertwined.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking some of these marketing strategies won’t work for your business, they typically work for ALL businesses albeit with some adaptation and thinking outside the box.

Always remember that just ONE idea from of these books can have the potential to triple (or more) your revenue.

It is important therefore that you don’t just read them as a form of entertainment, make sure you take notes as you go through and more importantly, implement them in your business.

1. The Ultimate Sales Machine – Chet Holmes

There are many useful strategies in this book, but the one that Chet is famous for is creating the Dream 100 strategy.

Chet was an old school salesperson who spent his days cold calling, wading through a list of 1000s of advertisers. However, he discovered that 167 companies in his chosen field were responsible for 95% of the market.

You’ve no doubt heard of the 80/20 rule, but often it can be more like 95/5.

It dawned on him that his time would be much better spent contacting those companies that would have the potential to make greater sales.

From this, he created the Dream 100 concept. In his book he puts to you that every business would have a set of clients that would produce the greatest sales if you could win them over.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be 100, but it should be all those you would ideally like as a client or customer.

This brings about his next principle which is to develop a “pig-headed determination”. How many of us have tried to win a client, customer or key person of influence and given up after one attempt. If not after one try, then certainly the second one.

Chet explains that in some cases, they either just missed the message, or the timing was off, or they simply get contacted by too many people on a regular basis.

Therefore, he puts it to you that if you never give up and consistently try to contact them in different ways, you should eventually get a reply.

As a side note, be inventive about HOW you contact them. If everybody is emailing them, then try calling them. Or, how about trying lumpy mail where you send them a gift in the post.

Adopting the principles in this book will go a long way to improving your chances in both business and life in general.

2. Scientific Selling – Claude Hopkins

Scientific Selling is a book you will often find listed in top ten books on business, selling and marketing, despite its age (it was written in 1923).

The reason this book is still so important is because the psychology behind why somebody makes a purchase hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.

While some principles in this book may seem obvious nowadays, this was the first time somebody laid out in a scientific manner many of the triggers that need to happen in a person’s mind to take them from a prospect to a customer.

For example, Claude noticed that people respond much better when you are very specific in your examples. So instead of saying something like “this strategy will greatly increase your revenue”, instead say “This strategy can add up to $67,000 per month to your revenue”.

Instead of “lose weight”, “lose 3 kilos in 2 months” etc.

Claude’s strength was in newspaper advertising which forced him to use tactics that were highly effective because ads often charged for the number of words used.

The most important of these was having a headline that stood out. If you weren’t able to grab your reader’s attention, then the rest of the advert wouldn’t get read at all. Again, this is something that is taken for granted these days but it’s still important to stress.

Although this is a relatively short book, anybody wishing to sell anything whether that is online or offline owe it to themselves to read this because it will give you the best grounding on how to sell and market a product or service.

3. Influence – Robert Cialdini

This book is and modern classic that further delves into the psychology of selling. It serves as the perfect follow up to the aforementioned book Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.

If you’ve ever wondered whether there are Jedi mind tricks you can use to influence somebody’s decisions, then this is the book for you. However, you should never use tactics to mislead somebody into buying something they don’t actually need or want.

Upon reading this book it will quickly become apparent why certain things appear in adverts and marketing materials. A good example of this is the use of testimonials.

Due to herd mentality that is buried deep in our DNA we are greatly influenced by other people’s opinions, especially if they are somebody of authority or someone who has been in the situation you are in now.

This book also highlights an interesting human trait in that we often use price as a way of judging the quality and value of something. As an experiment a shoe shop owner placed two pairs of identical shoes next to each other but put a price tag on one of them that was nearly three times the cost of the other. When asking customers which pair they would prefer, nearly all of them said the more expensive ones.

This book simply has too many examples of ways human psychology can be influenced to sell a product; you will need to have a highlighting pen handy or and sure you use the equivalent feature on your kindle device to take notes.

This book is an essential purchase.

4. Guerrilla Marketing and Joint Ventures – Jay Conrad and Sohail Khan

Just to be clear this is essentially two individual books that have been pulled into one. Guerilla marketing was a standalone manual by Jay Conrad on how you can get more leads and business for your company, most likely from an offline standpoint.

As a reviewer on Amazon said, “while many of the strategies in this book are still relevant, it is starting to show its age”. However, the reason I’m recommending this book is for the second part written by Sohail Khan on the subject of joint ventures.

It staggers me that one of the most powerful marketing strategies for new businesses and established ones alike is rarely mentioned or implemented. Forming a strategic partnership with another business that is related to yours but not in direct competition can literally explode your revenue overnight.

In fact, there are joint venture brokers who make a substantial income from arranging partnerships between businesses.

One of the leading authorities on the topic is Jay Abraham, however his material can be a bit intimidating and take an long time to wade through and decipher. Sohail’s book on the other hand is a more succinct and laid out in a more step by step fashion.

Particularly useful is the list of examples of partnerships that can be set up which you can either duplicate for your own business or at least give you some good ideas of your own.

5. Go Givers Sell More – Bob Burg

Go Givers Sell More is the follow up to the best seller The Go Giver which was a book that changed the lives of thousands of business owners on how they approached selling, marketing and life in general.

The main concept is instead of trying to get things from people, you look for ways you can give and help people. This in turn would result in you getting what you wanted. It was a fantastic book but the main problem I had with this, and many others did too was the fact the book was a fictional story used to illustrate these principles.

What people really wanted on the back of this was examples of how these strategies could be used from a marketing and selling perspective, and that is exactly what you get this follow up book.

This book completely turns the concept of selling on its head. Until I read this book, I never liked the process of selling something to somebody, most likely because it felt I was always trying to take something from them or convince them about my service, even though I knew I had something good to offer.

This book helps you see that you should take the focus away from yourself and your product and instead make it all about the other person and explore ways that you can help them. Then, it becomes more about asking them intelligent questions to help uncover what the root of their problem is and truly being interested in their point of view.

Then it is simply a case of seeing how your product or service can solve their problem and then whole heartedly recommending it to them if it is a good fit.

Marketing becomes so much easier because rather than it being a one-way conversation where you trying to convince them, it becomes more about a two-way collaboration. I highly recommend this short yet powerful book.