Marketing fundamentals
17 books that will make you a better marketer
Joe Nguyen, Founder
Key takeaways
- Start with positioning and customer understanding. Every other marketing skill builds on them.
- Writing clearly is a marketing skill you can practice, and several of these books show you how.
- The best marketers understand sales, product and people, not just marketing.
On this page
I only recommend books I've read and still give to people interested in marketing.
You should never stop learning, and marketing is no different. The channels change regularly. (Not long ago, "TiK ToK" was a Ke$ha song. Now about six in ten U.S. adults under 30 use TikTok.) The tools change every month, and the people you're selling to keep changing too. Industry reports, online courses, podcasts and YouTube all help. But for me, most of them don't give the clarity a book does. Below are the ones that changed how I actually do the work.
I've grouped them by the marketing skill they sharpen. If you only have time for one, start with the first book in the first section.
Positioning and messaging
Obviously Awesome
by April Dunford
The most practical guide to positioning I've found. Dunford walks you step by step through figuring out what your product really is, who it's for and why it's different, so customers get it quickly. If your homepage takes a paragraph to explain what you do, read this first.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
by Al Ries and Jack Trout
The book that named the idea. It's older, and some examples show it, but the core lesson hasn't aged: you don't win by being better. You win by owning a clear place in your buyer's head.
Building a StoryBrand
by Donald Miller
Miller's framework puts your customer in the hero's role and your company in the guide's. It's the fastest fix I know for messaging that talks too much about yourself. Great for founders writing their own website copy.
Made to Stick
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Why some ideas get remembered and others vanish. The Heaths break it down into simple, concrete, unexpected, credible, emotional and story. I use it as a checklist before I publish anything important.
Knowing your customer
The Mom Test
by Rob Fitzpatrick
This book teaches you how to talk to customers and find buyers, not just people trying to be nice. If you're about to run customer interviews, read this the night before. We use it in our guide to building an ICP and personas.
Competing Against Luck
by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan
The "jobs to be done" book. Customers don't buy products, they hire them to make progress on something. Once that clicks, your messaging starts sounding like your customer's problem instead of your feature list. It's the backbone of how we think about audience.
The Lost Art of Listening
by Michael P. Nichols
Not a marketing book, and one of the most useful on this list. Listening well is how you get honest customer insight, and it's how you earn trust with the sales and product people you work with.
Marketing, the big picture
This Is Marketing
by Seth Godin
Godin argues that marketing is about serving a specific group of people well, not shouting at everyone. It's a good reset when you've been buried in tactics and need to remember what the tactics are for.
Loved
by Martina Lauchengco
Written for people marketing tech products. Lauchengco covers what separates products people tolerate from products people love, and what marketing's job is in getting from one to the other.
Crossing the Chasm
by Geoffrey A. Moore
More than thirty years old and still required reading for anyone selling something new. Moore explains why early adopters and mainstream buyers want different things, and why so many products stall in the gap between them.
Content and writing
Everybody Writes
by Ann Handley
If you write anything for your business, and you do, this makes you better at it. Practical, funny rules for clearer sentences, better headlines and content people actually finish. If you edit AI drafts, pair it with our guide to rewrite instructions that work.
They Ask, You Answer
by Marcus Sheridan
The simplest content strategy I know: answer the questions your buyers are already asking, honestly, including the ones about price and competitors. Perfect for small teams deciding what to write next.
Influence
by Robert B. Cialdini
The psychology behind why people say yes: reciprocity, social proof, authority, scarcity and more. Useful for writing copy that persuades, and just as useful for spotting when you're overdoing it.
Growth and go-to-market
Traction
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
A tour of nineteen channels for getting customers, and a simple method for testing which ones work for you. Ideal for founders who've been told to "do marketing" and don't know where to start.
The Lean Product Playbook
by Dan Olsen
The most complete product management book I've read. Marketers who understand how products get built and tested make better launch partners, and founders get a clear framework for finding product-market fit.
Fanatical Prospecting
by Jeb Blount
A sales book, on purpose. Knowing how your sales team (or you, wearing the sales hat) opens conversations helps you build marketing that actually supports them instead of competing with them.
Working with people
Captivate
by Vanessa Van Edwards
Behavioral science for everyday interactions: first impressions, reading people, building rapport. Marketing runs on working across teams and with customers, and this makes both easier.
Where to go from here
Reading is the easy part. The hard part is finding the time to put it into practice when marketing is one of ten jobs on your plate. That's the important marketing work that gets dropped, and it's a big reason we built Smarkly. It learns your company from your own sources, keeps up with your competitors and industry and drafts in your voice, so you have more time to apply what you learn. Read why we built it, or try it free for 14 days with no card.
Got a book I missed? Tell me at hello@smarkly.com. I'm always adding to the list.
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Written by
Joe Nguyen
Founder
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