The Books We’re Reading Right Now

Need a new read?

Here are the books we have on the bedside table at the minute…

** This post may contain affiliate links. While we do only recommend products that we believe in, let’s be honest here – we’re in marketing, too, and everyone loves an affiliate link!

Binge Marketing: The Best Scenario for Building Your Brand

How do you build a brand in a time of information overload where the media are so fragmented that you can barely get the attention of your audience? And how do you ensure that everyone tells the same story on all those channels? Carlijn Postma takes you to the place where content is the product and where people know how to attract and retain an audience: Hollywood. Binge Marketing is not another stuffy marketing book, but a refreshing look at marketing in the 21st century. 

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Binge Marketing: The Best Scenario for Building Your Brand

Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

In Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content, Ann Handley delivers all the practical, how-to advice and insight you need for the process and strategy of content creation, production, and publishing. 

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Everybody Writes

Everyone is an “Influencer”: Building A Brand By Engaging The People Who Matter Most

In Everyone Is An “Influencer,” Kelly Keenan, Founder of Brand Story Experts, unlocks the code to brand story success. In this seminal marketing guide, you’ll learn how celebrating your story is a shift that builds and strengthens lifelong relationships with your team and customers.

Keenan goes far beyond short-term gains, sales gimmicks and shady tactics to provide the insight needed to inspire sustainable growth for your business. In digestible terms built upon decades of experience and case studies, Everyone Is An “Influencer” will teach you how to use brand education to differentiate and dominate your competition.

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Everyone is an “Influencer”: Building A Brand By Engaging The People Who Matter Most

I’m not a copywriter, but …

Stand-up comedy. Speechwriting. Pro wrestling? Somehow, these oddball life choices led Josh Womack to copywriting.

In his debut book, he talks about these experiences and more.

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Im not a copywriter but

Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust

Using real-world examples from trusted brands across dozens of industries, they’ll walk you step-by-step through the process of identifying and categorizing your business promises – even the ones you don’t realise you’re making – gathering the right evidence and backing up each style of claim.

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Prove it

The Content Fuel Framework 

Trained journalist and award-winning content marketer Melanie Deziel shows you how to maximize your creativity by systematizing it. This simple framework catalyzes the brainstorming process, making idea generation effortless and nearly automatic. No more writer’s block. No more asking “what should I post?” No more waiting for that “big idea” to show up in its own time. This system allows storytellers from any industry to produce fresh story ideas on demand, any time.

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The Content Fuel Framework

The Content Marketing Revolution

In this provocative and practical book, Salesforce marketing maven Mathew Sweezey boldly outlines this new “infinite media” environment and poses a profound question: In a transformed world where customers shape their own experience, what is the key to breaking through and motivating them to buy? It is context–the close linkage between an individual’s immediate desires and the experiences a brand creates to fulfill them. Drawing on new research and new insights into current consumer psychology, Sweezey defines the five key elements of context.

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The Content Marketing Revolution

An Ugly Truth

The definitive story of Facebook’s fall from grace, following the embattled company from 2011, when its power and positive influence was undisputed, to 2020, when it will face its biggest test yet-the US presidential election.

What are the ultimate ramifications when a few individuals are in charge of the technology used by half the world’s population? Can they control the technology they’ve unleashed into the world? And if not, can we, as individuals and as a society, control them?

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An Ugly Truth - Book

Cult Status

Enough has been written about huge cult brands founded last century – Nike, Apple, Red Bull. What will the cult companies of tomorrow look like? Who is amassing the kind of passionate community that makes a brand a massive, long-term, sustainable success?

Tim Duggan, co-founder of one of Australia’s most innovative and awarded new media companies has studied hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and change-makers over the last decade to uncover what they all have in common.

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Cult Status - Book

Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses

In this book, Nancy Harhut shows how to apply behavioral science principles in key areas of marketing, including marketing communications, email, direct mail and ad campaigns, social media marketing and sales funnel conversion strategies. Highly practical and accessible, it includes case studies and examples from AT&T, Apple, Spotify, and The Wall Street Journal.

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Using behavioural science in marketing

Content Performance Culture 

Christoph Trappe’s third content book focuses on how you can create the content performance culture you need to drive results in your organisation. Included are philosophy and tips on how to maximise content through podcasting and easy-to-produce video.

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Content Performance Culture

Superfans

Customers, followers, subscribers.

You don’t need to change the entire world to build a successful business; you just need to change someone’s world.

People don’t become superfans the moment they find you. They become superfans because of the magical moments you create for them over time.

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Superfans - Book

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

What makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumours more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumours more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

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Contagious: Why Things Catch On

No Filter

In just ten years, Instagram has gone from being a simple photo app to a $100-billion company. The journey has involved ground-breaking innovations, a billion-dollar takeover, and clashes between some of the biggest names in tech. But it’s a story that has never been told – until now.

Facebook’s decision to buy Instagram was the best investment it ever made. But we’re still learning about what it has cost the rest of us.

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No Filter - Book

Content Inc.

Today’s markets are getting more and more dynamic, and customers are increasingly fickle. Meanwhile the COVID-driven economic crash has made mitigating financial risk more important than ever.

From one of today’s leading experts in content marketing, Content Inc. is the go-to guide to building a solid small business by establishing a loyal audience before you sell any products or services. In these pages, Joe Pulizzi provides a lower-risk, better way to build a successful business by re-engineering the process that so often leads to failure: You’ll learn how to develop valuable content, build an audience around that content – and then create a product for that audience. 

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Content Inc. - Book

You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters

You have a terrific idea. It’s so powerful that it could change a life, a market, or even the world. There’s just one problem: Others don’t see its power – yet. If you truly value the possibility of your idea, then you’re ready to find your Red Thread – the throughline that connects your idea to your audience’s hearts and minds. It’s the connection that makes the invisible link between your audience’s problem and your solution tangible – and actionable.

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You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters

How Brands Grow

This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day. Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programs really affect loyalty How Brands Grow presents decades of research in a style that is written for marketing professionals to grow their brands.

It is the first book to present these laws in context and to explore their meaning and application.

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How Brands Grow - Book

Alchemy

Why is Red Bull so popular, though everyone—everyone!—hates the taste? Humans are, in a word, irrational, basing decisions as much on subtle external signals (that little blue can) as on objective qualities (flavor, price, quality). The surrounding world, meanwhile, is irreducibly complex and random. This means future success can’t be projected on any accounting spreadsheet. To strike gold, you must master the dark art and curious science of conjuring irresistible ideas: alchemy.

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Alchemy - Book

Building a StoryBrand: Clarifying Your Message so Customers Will Listen

If you use the wrong words to talk about your product, nobody will buy it. Marketers and business owners struggle to effectively connect with their customers, costing them and their companies millions in lost revenue.

In a world filled with constant, on-demand distractions, it has become near-impossible for business owners to effectively cut through the noise to reach their customers, something Donald Miller knows first-hand. In this book, he shares the proven system he has created to help you engage and truly influence customers.

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Building a StoryBrand: Clarifying Your Message so Customers Will Listen

Looking for some more books to read? Check out these other books we recommend reading:

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