As 2022 draws to a close and all eyes turn to the new year, it’s a good idea to turn our attention to one of the fastest-growing aspects of today’s e-commerce scene, digital marketing. Predictions for what 2023 holds in store for digital marketing offer us a rosy picture of increased digital content marketing budgets, greater social media participation, and more small businesses getting into digital marketing concepts such as online search strategies.
Knowledge is power, and books, whether print or audiobook, have much of the knowledge we need to become better informed about relevant topics, increasing our skills and preparing us for future challenges. To that end, this article lists 20 must-read digital marketing books to get you ready for 2023.
We will explore the best digital marketing books, including digital marketing e-books, how to choose other good online marketing books, and why reading digital marketing books is essential.
How to Pick the Best Digital Marketing Books to Read
For a medium that many people consider dead, there are sure a lot of books out there! So how does someone cut through the massive crowd of digital marketing books and narrow the choices to something you will benefit from?
It helps if you decide what aspect of digital marketing you want to focus on and learn about. After all, digital marketing covers a vast array of disciplines, such as SEO, content marketing strategy, social media marketing, PPC, and email marketing.
Additionally, you should figure out where your digital marketing skills fall in the spectrum. Are you a highly experienced digital marketer or just beginning your digital marketing career? You can find books that speak to all levels of digital marketing proficiency. A student just starting to grasp basic mathematics concepts should be reading something other than a textbook covering Algebra II.
Finally, it would be best to consider how much free time you can devote to reading. Your schedule may be so busy that audiobooks are a better option, something you can listen to while commuting.
Note: Explore the different types of digital marketing, including SEO, PPC, SMM, content marketing, email marketing, and more, to help you determine the best strategies for your business.
The Top Digital Marketing Books for 2023
These are the best digital marketing books for your new year’s reading. They are presented in no specific order.
1) Digital Marketing for Dummies
Author: Ryan Deiss and Russ Hennesberry
Description: Let’s start our list with a fundamental (and not unexpected) entry. There have been many instructional books under the “for Dummies” banner, and now it’s digital marketing’s turn. This 300-page book deals with marketing planning, SEM, SEO, display, social, paid, email, and data analytics. The book also pays special attention to the importance of a good landing age and even offers over 50 blog category ideas. This book is excellent for people just beginning their digital marketing careers. It’s a great introduction to digital marketing and an ideal foundation on which to build a digital marketing foundation. And speaking of books well suited for beginners, check out the next entry!
2) Digital Branding
Author: Daniel Rowles
Description: This book, written by Target Internet CEO Daniel Rowles, offers a straightforward look into the digital marketing field, benefiting beginners and experts alike. The book will help you plan and optimize your marketing strategy. It’s an easy read filled with informative content, various techniques, and tips for real-life examples. The book covers topics like:
a) Augmented and virtual reality
b) Social media policies and guidelines
c) How to deal with advancements in mobile marketing and mobile payments.
3) The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Description: Tipping points are defined as moments when a trend, idea, or social behavior tips over a threshold and spreads like wildfire. Just like how one sick person can spark an epidemic, so too can a tiny but carefully placed nudge cause a new online craze, a new product to become insanely popular, or make people protest for social change. In this book, Malcolm Gladwell covers the tipping point phenomenon and how it’s changing how people think about selling products and spreading ideas.
4) Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
Author: Gary Vaynerchuk
Description: Yes, the title sounds like someone is describing a boxing match, but it’s fitting. This digital marketing book explores the art of winning over customer loyalty by mastering the ability of social media marketing, offering a winning combination of the right punches and hooks needed to spark an emotional reaction.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a four-time New York Times bestselling author and early investor in well-known brands like Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Venmo. Gary points out how notorious brands generate sub-par content while remaining clueless about how social media platforms work.
Gary explains that people have different mindsets depending on their platform, and advertisers need to keep this in mind. Using right hooks and more punches, he gives readers an outline best suited to converting social media followers into brand loyalists.
5) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation, and Practice
Author: Dave Chaffey and Fiona Ellis
Description: This book covers every aspect of digital marketing and is a must-read for people who want to learn how to advertise with everything from the basics to the latest trends. The book provides practical direction on how to optimize digital branding, meet marketing objectives, and thrive in today’s competitive business atmosphere. Also, the book helps readers understand digital marketing by including interviews, practical business examples, and contextual analyses.
6) Shoot the HiPPO: How to be a Killer Digital Marketing Manager
Author: Tom Bowden and Tom Jepson
Description: Well, the title is certainly unforgettable! This book teaches the reader everything they need to know to become a better digital marketing manager, primarily focusing on creating a data-driven decision-making culture. The authors describe how, under challenging conditions, rational and data-based decision-making is often overshadowed by gut feelings and personal opinions. They suggest building a culture based on data-driven decision-making, which comes out to shooting the HiPPO. Additionally, they cover the technical skills needed to succeed in today’s digital marketing environment, including SEO, email marketing, and Google Analytics.
7) Digital Marketing Strategy. An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing
Author: Simon Kingsnorth
Description: This book contains cutting-edge updated information regarding automation, SEO, social media, customer loyalty, content marketing, user experience, and personalization. The text is augmented by downloadable templates and resources, providing a clear path for any marketer to streamline their digital marketing strategy to achieve measurable, optimized results. The book’s online resources include practical implementation guides covering email, SEO, paid search, lead generation, and more. As a bonus, this information is regularly updated to help readers evolve with changing digital marketing trends.
8) Everybody Writes. Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
Author: Ann Handley
Description: This digital marketing book is a how-to guide for attracting and retaining customers using excellent online communication since much of digital marketing is content driven, making all digital marketers writers to some extent. The book offers expert insight and guidance into the process and strategy of creating, producing, and publishing content, accompanied by actionable how-to advice that gets results.
9) What Customers Crave. How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint
Author: Nicholas Webb
Description: Businesses succeed by giving customers what they want. That’s great, but how do you know what customers want? Fortunately, author and business strategist Nicholas Webb breaks down this challenging yet vital task into confidently answering these two questions: What do your customers love? What do they hate? The book is filled with tools and examples and is a great resource for helping businesses reinvent how they engage with customers, either online or in person.
10) Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity
Author: Philip Kotler
Description: Marketing has changed drastically over the last century. It’s even changed profoundly over the previous 25 years! The valuable volume covers the mass changes facing today’s marketers, including today’s significant technological advances, ever-changing customer behaviors, and shifts in accepted business models. In addition, the book serves as a guide to help make their businesses more digitally focused and disruptive, typically by applying a mix of common sense and creativity with today’s increasingly powerful online digital marketing tools. The author even includes new cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality.
11) Marketing Communications: Integrating Online and Offline, Customer Engagement and Digital Technologies
Author: PR Smith and Ze Zook
Description: Renowned marketing professionals PR Smith and Ze Zook explore marketing communications, emphasizing strong online and offline communication integration. The book teaches the reader the fine points of communicating with their customers and success in engagement and retention. In addition, the book tackles problems facing digital markers, such as AI in marketing, ethical issues, and data management issues. This book covers topics like:
a) How businesses can successfully use AI, Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), AR/VR, and marketing automation in their campaigns
b) The opportunities and risks of social media
c) How to deal with ethical and data management challenges
d) How to use today’s chosen digital marketing tools and technology
12) The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
Author: Lon Safko
Description: This book is perfect for digital marketing experts, organizations, firms, and small or substantial business ventures. It’s updated with all the latest data, procedures, and strategies needed to achieve business success today through social media marketing. In addition, it covers updates and tactics needed for marketing through Google Search engines, Twitter, mobile marketing, gadgets, plug-ins, and applications.
13) The Big Data-Driven Business
Author: Russell Glass and Sean Callahan
Description: Big data casts a long shadow in today’s digital marketing world. This digital marketing book helps the reader understand big data’s significance, incorporating expert advice and real-life cases that serve as a helping medium to defeat the competition and win clients. Today’s businesses need to know how to use big data effectively, and this is the book that fills that need.
14) Art of SEO
Author: Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie C. Stricchiola
Description: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most vital disciplines for digital marketers to master because people constantly turn to search engines to get information. This third edition provides digital marketers with an updated look at SEO tools and website optimization techniques. The book even gives readers a sneak peek at the future of the search and SEO industry by exploring different algorithmic updates, instruments for tracking results, and new developments in local, mobile, and vertical SEO.
15) Hug Your Haters
Author: Jay Baer
Description: Here’s another one of the best digital marketing books with a title that stands out. Happy customers are the lifeblood of every successful business. This book provides a solid customer service framework by offering guidance on addressing private and public complaints and grievances. The book also shows the right time to respond to a customer’s complaint and how to employ the best tools and practices to turn a bad customer experience into a profitable and mutually satisfying solution.
16) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Author: Robert Cialdini
Description: Much has been written about getting customers to say “yes.” This digital marketing book, written by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, who has a PhD. in Psychology, explores what makes people say “yes.” The book is based on marketing fundamentals and helps readers understand and analyze them. The author’s extensive human psychological research background has aided him in devising six universal principles that teach readers how to become skilled persuaders.
17) Hooked
Author: Nir Eyal
Description: Why are some products insanely popular while others crash and burn? The reader gets the answers courtesy of the “Hook model,” a four-step process found in the products of many successful companies. This process encourages positive human behavior. Hooked is ideal for product managers, marketers, designers, and founders of start-up companies.
18) Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory and In Practice
Author: Kevin Hartman
Description: This book is an essential guide for marketers who want to collect, analyze, and visualize data from the digital world, otherwise known as analytics. The book breaks down analytics into five easy-to-understand parts split into multiple lessons.
a) The Day the Geeks Took Over
b) Consumer/Brand Relationships
c) The Science of Analytics
d) The Art of Analytics
e) Storytelling with Data
19) Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers
Author: Russell Brunson
Description: This digital marketing book takes a step-by-step approach in teaching readers the most effective ways to overcome the challenge of making their businesses known to potential customers, and driving that quality traffic into their funnel, creating a loyal customer pool in the process. Traffic Secrets offers multiple strategies to help you find the most effective ways to attract the ideal customer into your funnel, beginning with understanding who and where your ideal customers are. You will also learn how to effectively drive online traffic, how to increase your following across many platforms, and other methods of expanding your online business.
20) The New Rules of Marketing and PR
Author: David Meerman Scott
Description: This book offers the reader a well-ordered strategy for expanding visibility and sales by communicating with the buyers specifically. In addition, it provides resources for entrepreneurs and business owners to craft a solid advertising and PR program. This helpful guide comes with intriguing case studies and detailed analysis for confidently marketing any item, administration, or thought.
Why Read These Digital Marketing Books?
There are three proven ways of gaining skills and knowledge: taking classes, learning while doing, and independent study. Books are a vital element of independent research. Pound for pound, books are a great bargain and a valuable educational resource.
And reading is a very time-friendly activity. So if you have a spare hour with nothing to do, why not read one of these best digital marketing books?
Presenting Another Way to Boost Your Digital Marketing Knowledge
Reading is fundamental, but we’ve already hinted that there’s more than one way to increase your digital marketing knowledge. We’re referring specifically to learning online, and if you’re in the market for a comprehensive digital marketing course to study, we have you covered. Simplilearn, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers a comprehensive six-month bootcamp that helps you earn your digital marketing certification online. The bootcamp teaches you how to design effective, creative digital marketing campaigns to increase customer engagement and bring new customers to your business.
Once you complete the digital marketing training program, you will earn a certificate from UMass Amherst and Simplilearn, plus a membership in the prestigious UMass Amherst Alumni Association.
According to Indeed.com, digital marketers working in the United States earn an average yearly salary of $60,434. The standard digital marketing professional’s salary ranges from $36,313 to $100,579. However, note that these salary ranges are subject to mitigating factors such as employee experience level, company hiring, and the current supply and demand of the geographical job market.
So, between cracking open your online marketing books and doing essential digital marketing reading, take some time and join this fantastic bootcamp that will supercharge your digital marketing career. Sign up today!
