A Modern Marketer’s Reading List
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
— Groucho Marx
If you’re trying to stay on top of the latest-greatest strategies in marketing, sales and customer experience, this reading list may help! We’ve recently collected these articles, blog posts and a number of books to share with colleagues and friends who manage marketing and sales teams — and those that would like to better understand Inbound strategies as a whole.
We recommend saving this list for when you have a little free time in-between things. It's always a good idea to reserve some time each week towards research and learning, right? Helps all of us stay better connected with the community and affords us more opportunity to take advantage of lessons learned throughout the year.
HBR Quick Reads: We are a big, big fan of the Harvard Business Review. They have a vast collection of articles on a wide range of business topics. Here’s a few articles from HBR on the topic of Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. Some are very recent -- a few are dated, but all very insightful. Please note, if you are not a member of HBR you can still access 3 articles per month for free. The annual subscription fee is minimal - and worth it!
Books on General Marketing Strategies:
It’s true that in many circles “Inbound” and “Marketing Automation” go hand-in-hand. But you don’t have to purchase these platforms to appreciate and apply the benefits of Inbound to your marketing strategy. These books discuss the modernization of marketing over the past decade.
Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers, Hallligan and Shah (2014)
This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See, Seth Godin (2018)
Other Books on the Topic of Inbound: In full disclosure, some of these books are written by a few colleagues of mine. With this series, you can see how Inbound strategies can be applied just about everywhere these days!
Inbound Selling, Signorelli (2018)
Inbound Content, Champion (2018)
Inbound Organization, Tyre (2018)
Inbound PR, Stareva (2018)
Marketing Blogs: As you would imagine, there’s also a number of really well written and curated blogs on the topic you can follow and get nearly up-to-the minute insights…
Content Marketing Institute: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com
HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com
Moz: https://moz.com/blog
Unbounce: https://unbounce.com/blog
Marketo (An Adobe Company): https://blog.marketo.com
SalesForce: https://www.salesforce.com/blog
Marketing for the Life Sciences:
We find ourselves focused quite a bit on the Life Sciences market. We have a long track record of working in this industry for over 20 years. We have found a few rather bright folks out there that have written around the topic of marketing in this industry - and their findings are quite insightful. Our favorite of this bunch is "Persuading Scientists". I can't say there were any major break-throughs here, but understanding our audience and coming up with better, more organic ways to attract opportunity is always a plus.
Persuading Scientists: Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience, Ghanadan (2012)
Making the Complex Compelling: Creating High-Performance Marketing in the Life Sciences, Chapin (2015)
Digital Marketing to Scientists: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trends-digital-marketing-scientists-bill-kelly/
Top Predictions for the Life Sciences in 2019: https://bioinfoinc.com/12-predictions-2019-life-science-industry-vitro-diagnostics-market/
The Future?
And finally, we recently put together a blog post on "Marketing Vision 2020" you might want to check out. We provide download links to various trend reports from Microsoft, HubSpot, SalesForce and Adobe - along with numerous links to articles on Customer Experience, Organizational Preparedness, Inbound Content and more.
Hope you find this reading list helpful!
Aaron & The Team @ Inveniv