The digital landscape is ever-changing. With advances in technology, new approaches and new challenges, navigating the digital landscape is as complex as ever. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that can help you navigate the complex and ever-dynamic digital landscape and improve your ROI, get in touch with us.
Professionals who are new to digital marketing and want to grow their digital skills can stay tuned to this space – as we will be covering important insights from the digital market here. To start off your digital marketing career on the right track, learn the basics of marketing. We’ve rounded 6 books that will give you an insight into how to approach different aspects of marketing.
1. Branding with Powerful Stories: The Villains, Victims, and Heroes Model by Greg Stone –
Most marketing books focus on storytelling. This book also does that but it insists that the product or service you are selling should offer real-life solutions to customers. You address the ‘villains’: the problems that customers are facing and then tell the customers how your team can offer the right solutions. That’s the mantra. This brilliant book underlines that your message can be as powerful as your product or service. Be it attention-grabbing headlines or graphics, this book touches upon almost every aspect of storytelling and marketing.
Book Nugget: “Focus on the three principal “players” in any good story: the villain, the victim, and the hero. There is an old Hollywood adage that great scoundrels make great movies. Alfred Hitchcock said it best, “The better the villain, the better the picture.”…When you try to tell the story of your company, ask yourself who, or what, the heroes, villains, and victims may be. And start with the villains. Often they are not animate. In the mind of the consumer, mere frustration is a recognizable evil, as is a transaction that is incomplete or unsatisfying (anything from a faulty product to cold coffee to melted ice cream). It is important to note that the villain need not have a name, or even an identity (think of Voldemort in the Harry Potter tales—the one whose name cannot be spoken), but must be recognizable. The victim, as it were, is the customer whose problem you’re trying to solve. The hero? Your company or team.”
2. Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger –
Why do certain online content go viral? Why are some ideas more popular than the others? If you want answers to these questions, grab a copy of this insightful book. The book identifies 6 principles — Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. You can use these 6 principles to understand why certain social media posts become viral and how they affect the buyers’ choices. This book is an awesome guide for digital marketers who want to promote their product or service on different platforms.
Book Nugget: “People often talk about whatever comes to mind, so the more often people think about a product or idea, the more it’ll be talked about. We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue.”
3. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer –
Customers complaining about your product or service on social media can be a difficult experience. But not dealing with angry customers or ignoring them can be counterproductive because there is a lot to learn from those who complain. According to Baer, those who complain to get an issue fixed mean well and give you ample room to grow. But then some want more than a solution. They complain on social media just to get a reaction and audience. The book meticulously tells you how to deal with the two kinds. Next time, you have a bad review on social media, you know which book to turn to.
Book Nugget: “What we categorize as a complaint in social media (in particular) may not be a complaint in the same sense that a well-crafted e-mail or a telephone call is a complaint. Instead, these short, social missives are often simply expressions of the current situation. And among heavy social media users, any customer experience falling short of perfect is legitimate grounds to instantly admonish the business.”
4. Faster, Smarter, Louder: Master Attention in a Noisy Digital Market by Aaron Agius and Gián Clancey
Learn how to leverage digital channels to build your brand online. From social media growth tactics to brand advocacy – the book is a treasure trove of knowledge on drawing customers’ attention and converting them to your users. If you are looking for real-life examples, then it is a page-turner. Those who wish to learn how to make digital marketing strategy from scratch, this your go-to book.
Book Nugget: “Don’t just pay lip service to customer support. Live it. Set up your brand to be attentive, responsive, and legitimately helpful. Make support available on every channel—including phone, email, live chat, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Your customers should never feel like they’re stuck solving problems on their own.”
5. Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
Many companies continue to see marketing as a cost center and not as a profit center. This is because they are still seeing marketing from their conventional glasses. This book helps you relook at marketing from a new perspective and understand the importance of building audiences for long periods of time and holding their attention throughout the stages of their purchase journey.
Book Nugget: “Audiences can provide for multiple lines of value. They provide campaign value, enabling smarter marketing and advertising. They provide for competency value, enabling the acquisition of data to make us a smarter business. They provide customer value, helping us develop more loyal customers who will advocate for our brand. And audience can provide cash value, enabling us to make marketing a profitable venture.”
6. What Great Salespeople Do: The Science of Selling Through Emotional Connection and the Power of Story by Ben Zoldan, Michael T. Bosworth:
The book combines the latest research on how the brain works and how good salespeople create emotional connections with their buyers. A diagnostic approach that focuses on the numbers and ROIs does not influence customers. It is the stories with which the customers relate to. If you get the story right by influencing the customer using the power of emotion, you have made a connection. This book will equip you with real-world knowledge to use the power of emotion in the right way.
Book Nugget: “When we launch into detailed descriptions about our products, we force buyers to use left-brain processing to analyze the heaps of data we’re sending their way. Of course, the left brain has an unending appetite for information—give it some details, and it has to have more. The sales call quickly devolves into endless product hell…Once a salesperson shifts from storytelling to traditional selling, he is trying to move the buyer’s head, not his heart. But it’s the heart—the emotional limbic system—that makes the decision to say yes. That’s the part of the brain that sellers need to be speaking to.”
We hope you these books will find a spot in your bookshelf or your e-library! Read, learn, and grow!
