Growth Hacks: The Best Books for Growth Marketers to Read Before the End of 2019

Growth Hacks: The Best Books for Growth Marketers to Read Before the End of 2019

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The Best Books for Growth Marketers to Read Before the End of 2019

2019 will soon be coming to a close. How, as growth marketers, can we prepare ourselves to hit the ground running in 2020 and achieve explosive growth for our companies and clients?

I asked marketers, founders, and CEO’s a question:

What is one book that changed the way you looked at growth and brought tangible results for your company this year?

Here are their 10 recommendations, the best books for growth marketers to read before the end of the year:

1. Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

Recommended by Jakub Kliszczak, marketing specialist at CrazyCall:

What’s amazing about this book is the fact that it teaches you a whole new approach to growth marketing. While the field itself is vastly experimental and emphasizes the power of ‘trying things out’ Rory takes this to a whole new level. What you’ll learn is that instead relying on hard-coded metrics or rational assumptions, you should let your mind wander and try what’s irrational. That’s because what oftentimes seems irrational works far better than what’s considered rational. I believe the book will help any growth marketer become better at his craft, solely to the fact that the book will teach you the new approach to thinking itself and thinking about other people’s motivation between various choices.

2. Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

Recommended by Zach Fox, Director of Product & Customer Marketing at RD Station

This is a very simple book to understand and create a strong positioning for your company or product. It helped us, as a SaaS company, define a better process for re-positioning our core product, something we are currently working on.

3. The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

Recommended by Sysamone Phaphon, Head of Growth at Vertosa

If you judge the book by it’s cover, you will assume this book will help you seduce a lover, but it’s so much more than that. This book is a great template to persuade anyone in any role to convert and act in your best interest. After all, that’s what growth hacking is really about. No matter what tactic or tool we are using, we want to persuade someone to act in our best interest through purchasing our product or service, liking our post, follow our business page, etc. Reading this book helped me learn to adapt my messaging, my approach, my behavior towards my audience target that I was trying to persuade to act in my best interest.

4. Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller

Recommended by Tyler Smith, founder of Bicycle2Work

This book helped me understand that my customers need a guide. As a business my job is to inspire, educate, and help customers achieve their goals. It can be tempting to think of ourselves or our business as the hero when in reality the customer is the hero in need of help. When the customer is the hero and the business acts as a guide, you’ll see more customers than ever before, because you’re someone they can trust to help. This perspective has changed the way I create content and talk about my business which in turn has led to growth.

5. Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

Recommended by Annika Helendi, co-Founder & CMO at ContentFly.

This book made me understand the bigger picture of how new technologies and services are adopted based on what motivates people to try out new things. This helped me to understand why the messages and strategies that used to work for early adopters didn’t seem to work with the early majority.

6. They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan

Recommended by Jake Rheude, VP of Marketing at Red Stag Fulfillment

This is a book I keep referring back to. I’ve never encountered a more holistic approach to marketing — I love that there is such an emphasis on how non-growth marketers in your company, such as engineers or software developers, can be useful contributors to your company’s marketing efforts. If you want to expand beyond the conventional ideas of marketing, this is the book for you.

7. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

Recommended by Dani Hart, Founder of GrowthGal

Company growth is a product of the company’s culture. If the culture does not embrace a growth mindset, it will be difficult to take risks and learn. This book allowed me to see the value in a growth mindset, how to spot one “in the wild” and how to support those with a growth mindset.

8. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr

Recommended by Shakun Bansal, Head of Marketing at Mercer | Mettl

This book shows why it’s highly critical for any individual, team, and organization to be driven by bigger goals and a vision broken down into smaller objectives.. It’s also equivalently important to keep doing things to reach those smaller objectives, measure them continuously, recalibrate working methodologies and workflows, and keep improving your end results. This thought process turns an organization into a high-performance organization and makes growth marketing initiatives successful. Measuring what objectives are providing optimum results and failing fast to remove those objectives that aren’t serving any purpose is a crucial and continuous process for evolution in times of disruption.

9. Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business by Tiffani Bova

Recommended by Michael Rynerson, CEO of Xcentric Mold & Engineering

This book provides very a concrete framework to to help executive leaders evaluate, plan, and execute growth strategies for their organizations. Moreover it highlights the connections between various core concepts that drive growth, and the need to frequently reassess which strategic approaches are appropriate for each phase of a company’s development. My team and I have implemented elements of Growth IQ into revitalizing the growth of our company, and the results are impressive. We are literally living Growth IQ every day.

10. Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young

Recommended by Hale Schneider, Head of Growth Marketing at GrowthHackers

Growth Marketing is a constantly-evolving landscape. The strategies, tools, and tactics we use today may not even have existed last year. The only guarantee we have is that change will come. To prepare for an take advantage of this change we must be adept at learning to use new technology and learning new ways to execute our craft. This books outlines the principles to follow to become an ultralearner, one who can master hard skills quickly. It’s basically a growth process for your own knowledge.

What about your recommendation? Is there an absolute must-read book missing from this list?

Share it in the comments.

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The Best Books for Growth Marketers to Read Before the End of 2019 was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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