As I was pondering what to share in this month’s newsletter, an email about books hit my inbox. It was my daily New York Times digest. And, one of the stories featured was the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. To be honest, I only scrolled through the first 50. And, gosh, I haven’t read any of them. But, of course, now I am excited to have a new “to read” list.

How to Vacation: Read Books

On our annual July Fourth vacation to Gulf Shores, Alabama, not only do I cherish time with my kiddos, and the family tradition we have built. I enjoy reading, as I don’t have the opportunity to do it enough during the work week. On this vacation, I have a goal of reading a book a day. I know that sounds impossible, right? But I am a speedy reader when I’m engaged in a good book.

Reading to me is relaxation. It is an escape. Also, reading fills my head with new perspectives and ideas — even if I am reading romance or mystery novels. I do try to sharpen my parenting skills and throw in a parenting book now and then as well. In addition, adding business or professional development books to my library is important to me.

Books I’ve Been Reading This Summer

This year’s Fourth of July consumption, “dearest gentle reader,” did not disappoint. Highlights included:

James Patterson by James Patterson — My first audio book ever. Yes, stating this makes me feel like a dinosaur. I had no idea Patterson worked at J Walter Thompson. And was an executive there. He also produced some of the most iconic tag lines and creative concepts of all time! From this, I took away much. In addition to this one, I am adding two other books to my reading list: One by him and a book he gifts to others.

Five Principles of Parenting by Dr. Aliza Pressman — I have a 23-year-old son. Yet, parenting today and all the wise people and new learnings out there are still a benefit to me when I’m parenting my 11-year-old daughter. This book is a true treasure trove of wisdom.

Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson — Wowsa. There were many unexpected turns and twists. Also, mind blown regarding new learnings on the science of volcanoes and other things. A must read y’all.

This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune — This is one of the top easy-to-read and escape-into books of the summer.

Need More Insights on These Books?

Want to share why you read and what your favorites are? I’m happy to have a call or Teams chat. Or leave a comment here. Summer reading and time away from work are so important for the soul, don’t you think?

Of course, if we can help you with your marketing and branding needs, book discussion or not, email, call or text us.

Looking For More Than a Beach Read? Try One of These Marketing Books.

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Messages So Customers Will Listen

Written by Donald Miller, this book is the perfect guide to strengthen your relationships and loyalty to your consumers. This book draws on the seven universal powers of storytelling. It teaches you how to craft a brand story to gain a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

Building a StoryBrand is the marketing book that will transfigure the way you sell your brand. And the value it brings. It is for leaders who are wondering how to create a clear and consistent brand message. This book is the perfect read for helping you reach your audiences.

Contagious, Why Things Catch On

This book written by Jonah Berger explains the science behind how word-of-mouth and social transmission work. Berger reveals six principles of how ideas and products catch on, appealing to business leaders, politicians, health officials, and anyone trying to sell an idea or product. The book was a New York Times bestseller. It was also awarded the best marketing book in 2014 by the American Marketing Association.

For scientific and analytical thinkers, this is the best marketing book to help you understand the science behind the human brain and natural human tendencies when marketing your brand.

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

Looking to rapidly grow your brand? Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown is perfect for you. This read touches on the marketing strategy called Growth Hacking. It originated in Silicon Valley and refers to the rapid growth of a company. This book provides you with all the necessities and tools. Your teams can use it to maximize growth, customer base, and market share in a reasoned and deliberate way.

Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind

Are you overwhelming your customers with information? Are they skeptical of the over-consumption of media? Then this marketing book written by Al Ries and Jack Trout is perfect for you. The goal of this book is to keep your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in mind, and use this information to strategically position your company in the customer’s minds.

Whether you are new to the market or seasoned, this book provides you with the information to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Make an educated approach to align your brand with your customer’s needs.

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers

Seth Godin reveals his alternative marketing strategy of advertising goods and services only after getting advance consent. People do not respond positively when their lives are “interrupted” by unwanted advertisements.

This book shows brands how to effectively use permission marketing and the wide success it has had on various companies. If you are looking for a way to passively market your brand in a manner that consumers will find subtle and professional, this is the perfect book to read.

We have put together a must-read list of ’10 marketing books for 10 years’. Front Porch Marketing turns 10-years-old this month! Marketing has been constantly evolving over the past decade. As an all-remote, agile marketing company, we’ve evolved right along with it. But sometimes it can get hard to stay on top of all the changes.

That’s why we turn time and time again to the experts in our marketing books. In honor of our 10^th anniversary, we rounded up 10 must-read marketing books that we think demonstrate positive perspectives and practical advice.

Books are one of the easiest ways we know to dive into new marketing topics. Then we can grow our practice and application of that knowledge. We hope these suggestions offer you some inspiring new perspectives on the ever-evolving world of marketing and help you stay on top of all the changes. If we can help you with your marketing challenges in any way, please ask!

Must Reads: 10 Marketing Books for 10 Years – our marketing reading list for 2021

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers by Seth Godin

This is one of our favorites. Seth teaches you how to frame your marketing messages so that your customers will willingly accept them. Permission marketing enables brands to cultivate long-term relationships with customers. This builds trust and ultimately increases the likelihood of making a sale. Seth challenges you to only talk to people who are already raising their hand asking to speak with you. Then he shows how this customer is your most valuable one.

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant

This one is near and dear to our own Front Porch Marketing mantra. Adam – an award-winning researcher and professor – says that the key to success is not ambition or greed, but thoughtfulness. Good guys will indeed finish first in Adam’s worldview. And he gives ample evidence and example to prove it.

The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing, by Karen J Marchetti

Karen leads with proven and practical digital strategies to boost client leads. She shows you how to increase email click-through rates and generate higher opt-in rates. She shares how to assess your current digital marketing channels like SEO, email and PPC and optimize them for better results. And with an emphasis on small business, this book serves as a handbook to make the most of every marketing dollar.

Marketers of Tomorrow: A Step by Step Toolkit for Inbound Marketing by Tyrona Heath

Tyrona, a Google marketing alum, offers valuable information on attracting and converting customers using inbound marketing. With SEO, blogging, social media and email marketing as your toolkit, follow Tyrona’s step-by-step system to set up and deliver an inbound marketing plan. Turn strangers into visitors, visitors into leads, leads into customers and customers into loyalists using minimal resources.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

The authors of this book base their thinking on a study of 150 strategic marketing moves spanning more than 100 years and 30 industries. They show you how to build lasting success from creating a new market space (a blue ocean) in which there are no competitors. This book represents a ground-breaking new perspective because dominant marketing thinking for the past 25 years has been concerned with creating revenue by taking market share away from a competitor.

Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story, by Miri Rodriguez

Miri helps brands understand the why and how of infusing their marketing strategies and tactics with an authentic voice that will resonate with consumers. This book serves as a template for helping brands discover that voice, and their story, and structuring them to share insights with their customers.

Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit by Joe Pulizzi & Robert Rose

Joe and Robert – the founder and the Chief Strategy Advisor for the Content Marketing Institute – share bold thinking putting content at the forefront of marketing. They’ll help you create value for consumers and instill loyalty in your followers. This book outlines how to look at marketing as a profit center instead of a cost center. Content marketing helps brands own media instead of purchasing it.

The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks: How Brands Create Authentic Engagement by Understanding What Motivates Us, by Joe Federer

Joe, the former head of strategy at social media giant Reddit, offers effective engagement strategies on social media through the lens of human psychology, neuroanatomy, biology and anthropology. Using more than a decade of experience, he explains consumer behavior in social media in terms of how the different social platforms each represent different mindsets: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego.

Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy by Anindya Ghose

From the MIT Press, Anindya draws from his extensive research in the US, Europe and Asia using real-world examples from global companies to explain consumer behavior in the mobile realm. He identifies nine forces that shape consumer behavior and how to tap into those forces to influence shoppers and maximize brand opportunities.

What’s Your Problem? Become a Better B2B Marketer by Enhancing Your Problem-Solving Skills by Steve Goldhaber

Before jumping into content marketing, step back and assess what the core business problems are that content marketing can solve. Steve offers a guide to identify and define those problems. Then he helps you understand where content marketing can add the most value for your brand. Content marketing is more than just writing and design, and Steve teaches better techniques for distribution, measurement and optimization.

Let us know if you’ve read some of these, or have others that are your favorites! Please share your favorite marketing books in the comments to make our list more complete.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. – Groucho Marx

One of my favorite authors, Gretchen Rubin, once wrote that if a person enjoys reading about their industry in their off-duty hours, they are on the right career path. I actually enjoy reading about marketing – I love learning about how companies promote themselves, new marketing tools I can use, and the pitfalls of unsuccessful marketing.

Here are a few of my favorite titles:

The Storytelling Non-Profit: A practical guide to telling stories that raise money and awareness  by Vanessa Chase Lockshin

Before reading The Storytelling Nonprofit, I was a big fan of Lockshin’s blog. It took me a while to buy her book (my parents call me cheap, I prefer the word frugal). I’m glad that I did.

Every nonprofit has a story to tell and I fervently believe that nonprofits can, and should, use storytelling to market themselves and raise funds. Part guide, part workbook, The Storytelling Nonprofit takes the reader step-by-step through a storytelling process that will reach audiences and donors.

The Crowdsourceress: Get Smart, Get Funded, and Kickstart Your Next Big Idea  by Alex Daly

I like the The Crowdsourceress for a few different reasons: 1) I love learning about people who took a circuitous route to the work that they do now, 2) it’s full of fun stories about successful (and not so successful) crowdsourcing campaigns, and 3) the book gets down to the nitty-gritty of marketing.

In the beginning of the book, Daly was working for a documentary film production company, writing grant applications, when one day a colleague asked her what turned out to be a fateful question: “What do you know about Kickstarter?” From there, the book takes a deep-dive into marketing for crowdsourcing campaigns. Even if you never crowdsource funding, this book is applicable to the marketing of any business or product.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

Now in its 6th edition, David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a great introduction to digital media that enables two-way communication between businesses and their customers. At the time that the first edition came out, I knew that social media could be used to build relationships with prospective audiences, but I wasn’t sure how. This book was a great introduction. Scott updates the book every year with fresh, new content.

Scott outlines case study after case study of businesses that used social media, video, and blogs to create an open dialog and build relationships with their customers. If you are unsure about the seemingly Wild West that is the social, online world, The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a great primer.

“You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have – arm yourselves!” – Doctor Who, Episode: Tooth and Claw

If you love reading about marketing as much as I do, I hope you enjoyed this list. If you don’t, you can always call us, and we would be more than happy to help guide your next campaign.