4 Books to Start Your Marketing Career
If you start your career at a marketing agency, often times they won’t actually teach you marketing. You might get really good at Facebook Ads Manager, but no one will tell you why you’re actually using Facebook Ads and where it fits in the marketing strategy. The larger your company, the more specialized your role will be, which means even your bosses boss might not really understand the broader picture.
If you head to the internet to learn about marketing, good luck! It’s not that good content doesn’t exist, its just buried in a sea of not so good content with great SEO.
The books on this list should get you started and from there you will be better equipped to wade through the rest of the marketing content and pick out the gems.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin
1. The 1-Page Marketing Plan
This isn’t the first book I read but I wish it was. The 1-Page Marketing plan strips marketing to its bare bones and walks you through the buyer journey from learning about your product through retention strategies. Allan Dib teaches you about audience research, how advertising is used to identify hand-raisers and not sell your product, nurturing prospects and the important of customer lifetime value.
Dib lays out a strong framework for getting started and essentially, understanding the rules of the game. Learn it first, then build on it throughout your career.
2. Zero to One
This is not a marketing book. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, provides all of the basics of company building with absolutely zero fluff. This is the equivalent of The 1-Page Marketing Plan, for understanding business overall.
If you want to be successful in marketing you need to understand how the broader business works.
Financial questions demand financial answers. Brand metrics are absolutely relevant and important, but typically, folks outside of marketing tend to care less about them. — Raja Rajamannar, CMO American Express, Quantum Marketing
Raja puts it best. If you bring the brand metrics outside of the marketing department you will not succeed. Today you need to understand how marketing contributes to the bottom line and be able to articulate that to different business functions.
This is also true in an agency setting. You need to understand how your company makes money and what your value proposition is to your clients. Understanding your clients business as well is a massive differentiator and will often give the effect of you understanding the needs of your clients before they do.
As a bonus he has an amazing chapter on marketing which sums up why even the best products need marketing and how marketing and sales work when selling to different customers (consumer products vs large dollar sales).
P.S. if you work at a tech company it’s safe to assume more than half of your coworkers have read this book so you might as well just read it :)
3. Crossing The Chasm
Crossing The Chasm is about taking a successful startup from early success to industry standard. This is an amazing book, but unlike the others its quite specialized and significantly more advanced. The reason I’m adding it as core reading is Geoffery Moore gives one of the best guides to defining your market I’ve read so far. He teaches how to size a market based on your budget and why small companies must have different markets (and tactics) than the big corporations. It’s a sobering guide on exactly how to transition your company from a few customers to an industry standard and how sales and marketing play a role.
4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you want to be a marketer, sooner or later you are going to have to be a writer. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read full stop. If this wasn’t a marketing list On Writing would be at the top.
People don’t read ads, they read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad. — Claude C. Hopkins
Don’t create an advertisement, create a story that sells. — Claude C. Hopkins
At its core marketing is about storytelling, capturing attention and creating interest in your product. Stephen King is one of the best storytellers to ever live and On Writing is his book on the subject.
He writes simple stories, for a mass audience. He doesn’t try to prove his academic bonefides with a complex style. Instead he writes simply, in a style that can capture anyone’s interest.
To tell a story as a marketer, you need to be quick, and clear, but find a way to elicit an emotion, and no one does that better than Stephen King.
What these books taught me
Spend every dollar cautiously
Because of my mother, a dime to me has always looked as big as a dollar. Not my dimes only, but the other fellow's dimes. I have spent them carefully, both as owner and trustee. I have never gambled in a large way, whether acting for myself or for others. So the failures I have made have never counted strongly against me. -Claude C. Hopkins
As a young marketer at an agency its easily to get a warped perception of the value of a dollar. You watch hundreds of thousands of dollars be spent in a day. Multi million dollar deals being done after 20 minute phone call. All of these books encourage a sobering view of the dollar. Spending money is rarely avoidable but it should be spent with caution and any time you are spending money you should have a strong understanding of what you are buying. It may sound simple but I have found that not to be the case more often then not and it will pay off in spades to remember this.
Aim for simple
The great majority of men and women cannot appreciate literary style. If they do, they fear it. They fear over-influence when it comes to spending money. - Claude C. Hopkins
At some point all of these books urge you to make things simple. In communication, simple messages get through and stand a chance of sticking, while complexity often never even gets through. For me it can be easy to get caught up trying to prove your intelligence. Big words. Complex style. This is always about ego and will not yield the results you want in the end. Is it better to be smart or to be right?
Bonus Book Recommendation
You may notice a lot of quotes in this post come from an author that isn't mentioned (and you've probably never heard of). Claude C. Hopkins is considered one of the founding fathers of modern advertising. He wrote two amazing books, often printed as one today, called My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising. I was apprehensive about reading a book published in the early 1900s but this book was thrilling.
Claude C. Hopkins pushes writing simply and with an eye on the common man. This makes all of his stories easy to be swept up in and his writing style timeless. Claude presents a lot of marketing tactics that make up the bread and butter of marketing today such as, test marketing, coupon sampling, and copy research. He also gives a very philosophical look on what good marketing is, and who a marketer should be. Its an incredibly interesting read, probably for someone with at least a few years of experience under their belt.