Good content marketing books can greatly improve content marketing skills, helping professionals learn more about how to perfect their practices while restoring their passion. There are plenty of excellent content marketing books available for marketers, many of them published within the past year.
Here are five content marketing books that you can purchase for yourself or gift to your coworkers, friends, employees, or any others who can use them to improve their marketing skills. Each book recommended here will cover a different aspect of content marketing to help you decide which books you want to grab.
1. Non Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict the Future
Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious is a great book for content marketers who either want to focus on content creation alone or become thought leaders in their industry. The book provides tips for content curation, arguing that there’s a lot more to it than republishing content that’s already written. Non Obvious also shows content marketers how to use content curation to help establish themselves as authorities in their industries, with the ability to spot trends and provide information that inspires.
Section two of the book details something called the Haystack Method, which is a process used for finding and grouping ideas, discovering themes and naming them, and providing proof. Section three of the book also provides an in-depth roadmap to help monetize any identified trends. Rohit makes sure no details are missed to teach readers how they can be the thought leaders and content creators they aspire to be.
2. The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right
Meghan Casey’s Content Strategy Toolkit can help content marketers understand what it takes to run a professional content agency, with a behind-the-scenes look at Brain Traffic, at which Casey is the lead content strategist. Throughout the book, Casey covers the content creation process as it relates to issues such as figuring out budgets, getting support from stakeholders, determining project objectives, researching competitors, and detailing a content strategy to help ensure successful execution.
The Content Strategy Toolkit also provides readers with over 30 downloadable word processing and spreadsheet templates that Brain Traffic uses when working with Fortune 500 clients. You’ll be able to easily integrate these templates in your content marketing practices.
3. The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control Is the Engine of Success
The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel covers the psychology that can either help or hinder content marketers’ productivity, mainly exploring the fundamentals of self-control as they pertain to a company’s success. The book reviews many experiments throughout history that have contributed to the development of motivation and productivity books.
Mischel explores a study that took place over 50 years ago, which involved 4- to 5-year-olds who were given a choice between eating a single marshmallow when offered one, or waiting 20 minutes for two marshmallows. The study followed these participants for the rest of their lives, revealing that the ones who chose to wait for two marshmallows had better success in their careers, better health, and fewer divorces than the children who chose instant gratification.
The book effectively shows how self-control plays a major role in success, which is applicable to content marketing and creation among many other business aspects.
4. Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy
Ryan Levesque’s Ask is a great book for people who want to discover ways to make money from their expertise through determining what customers want. Levesque details exactly how to ask the right questions to learn what customers seek from your services. Through this information, content marketers can understand more about how to reach out to those customers through engaging content that inspires them to purchase your products or services.
Ask is great for marketers who have already written content and want to find ways to market it to their target audience. Levesque discusses a detailed engagement program that can help marketers develop a survey program that can give them ideas about how to effectively market content to meet readers’ needs. Through more effective marketing of content, readers will be more equipped to monetize it.
5. Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses
In Content Inc., Joe Pulizzi provides plenty of valuable insight as the founder of the Content Marketing Institute. As his fourth book, it’s arguably the most personal in his publishing career. Pulizzi gives readers a six-step process for content marketing that nearly anyone can use to overhaul and profit from content.
Pulizzi talks about his own successes and failures, and shares all of what he’s learned from them to help businesses experience the kind of success that the Content Marketing Institute has been able to experience. Through Pulizzi’s advice, companies can learn how to overcome their own challenges and push for success when it comes to content marketing and other aspects of their business.
Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
These five books are among the most helpful for content marketing, offering advice based on everything from personal experience to detailed processes that have been proven to bring success. With these books in your library, you’ll be better equipped to develop engaging content that readers will love, along with helpful marketing tools to make sure that content reaches the ideal audience.
If you want to further improve your content marketing strategy without doing it on your own, Clickx offers content marketing services to help make sure your content is strong, and develop a strong marketing campaign that can reach potential customers across a wide range of platforms.
Have any other suggestions for books about content marketing? Let us know in the comments!
