13 Best Digital Marketing Books to Read in 2023

Nowadays, marketers and business owners always have to deal with the risk of being left in our competitors’ dust.

With businesses, staying ahead of the competition is more challenging than ever before. Face pressure from three sides - the crazily developing pace of technology, fiercely competitive environment, and customer dominance.

That’s why the marketing role is more and more crucial in the business world. And one way to catch up with modern competition is always keeping us informed.

Below are some of the best digital marketing books to help you do it right and gain the edge over your competitors.

Related topics:

• The Best Affiliate Marketing Books
• The Best Network Marketing Books

Without further ado, let’s get started!

Table of contents

• Customer behavior books
  • The Customer of the Future
  • What Customers Crave
• Digital marketing books: From basic to advanced
  • See you on the Internet
  • The Tools and Modules of Digital Marketing
  • Digital Marketing For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance))
  • The 1-Page Marketing Plan
• Social media marketing books
  • #GetSocialSmart
  • Superfans
  • Social Media ROI
• Some modern digital marketing strategies and tactics
  • Email Marketing Rules
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Marketing Analytics
  • SEO For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/ Tech))
• Final thoughts

Customer behavior books

Change is the dominant fact of life in every business today.

One of the changes you can see is the role of the “customer-centric mindset”. The shift between traditional and digital marketing makes that mindset more essential than ever before.

Modern marketers or business leaders need to be aware of the challenges of complexity and scale they meet to achieve customer-centricity, especially under the impact of advanced technology.

What is customer behavior like in the digital world? Those books below can help you find your wanted answers.

The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business

By Blake Morgan | Amazon rating: 4.7/5 (122 ratings)

This is the book I highly recommend to entrepreneurs, marketers, or people in any marketing-related position. You will be amused by how readable and engaging this book is.

It provides you a realistic look at the reasoning behind the failure of a business. Furthermore, readers can have a new and modern approach to leveraging customer insights to bring them the most satisfactory experience via dozens of examples in reality.

Instead of a bunch of heavy-theoretical formulas and knowledge, this book focuses on the microscopic explanation of how and why those things happen.

The book starts with a weird situation when Morgan was working in New York in the middle of the financial crisis. What we could witness were deserted streets that not long ago was busy. Is that a wake-up call, as well as an inadvertent source of hope for readers.

Through 10 specific strategies with examples and case studies, Morgan takes us from what customers now and future want to businesses could become a game-changer via technology.

This book can be a beneficial source of information for any company in today’s fierce competition.

What Customers Crave: How to create relevant and memorable experiences at every touchpoint

By Nicholas J. Webb | Amazon rating: 4.1/ 5 (75 ratings)

No doubt that customers are the core determinants of a business’s success.

Nowadays, to gain competitive advantages and additional value, even huge companies still have to research their customer’s wants, needs, and desires tirelessly. And in the age of digital technology, their insights are even more difficult to discern.

Within What Customers Crave, the author shows his look on how companies can adapt to influencing customer’s minds and expectations via what their audience hates and loves.

This book puts readers in the position of a regular consumer so that you can bring back relevant and engaging values at every touchpoint that keep them coming back and even be your advocates.

Digital marketing books: From basic to advanced

Digital marketing involves various aspects, including SEO, email marketing, advertising, social media marketing and analytics.

As a fresher who intends to be a digital marketing generalist or specialize in a specific area, having an overall view of the digital marketing ecosystem certainly supports you in understanding and using them most effectively.

See you on the Internet: Building Your Small Business with Digital Marketing

By Avery Swartz | Amazon rating: 4.8/5 (26 ratings)

See You On The Internet is a great start for novices or any small company that wants to promote their businesses online.

This book provides you with practical examples of different aspects of the digital world. It’s filled with real anecdotes about entrepreneurs applying multiple strategies to set up and maintain their digital presence.

From web development, SEO to online advertising, everything you need to know about digital marketing can be found in this book.

All the topics are well-organized, transformed clearly, and easy to skim, which leads you from the start to the end of the book without feeling overwhelmed or bored.

The Tools and Modules of Digital Marketing: A definitive guide to learning the art of digital marketing for beginners

By Mr. Vishaw Deepak

When compared to the See Yon On The Internet, The Tools and Modules of Digital Marketing is more like a textbook that provides you with a full list of tools and modules in digital marketing.

his book is for you if you’re an entrepreneur or a management student specializing in digital marketing. It contains 21 essential modules of digital marketing prevalent in the world.

You can find the most comprehensive guide to all crucial aspects of online marketing and the step framework from planning to measuring each channel platform.

Through this book, readers will be equipped with a full understanding of digital marketing to undertake any related-digital marketing role in organizations.

Digital Marketing For Dummies

By Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry | Amazon rating: 4.5/ 5 (198 ratings)

Digital Marketing for Dummies is packed with highly actionable, up-to-date, practical strategies to engage your audience, build brand awareness, and drive more sales.

The authors will walk you through all the basic principles of digital marketing. With five main sections starting from basic to advanced knowledge, this book offers a solid launching pad for all your digital marketing strategies in the future.

However, this book is more suitable for newbies who are entirely fresh or want to have an overall look of digital marketing from my point of view. So if you expect something in-depth, you should find a book that focuses on a specific aspect of digital marketing such as SEO or content.

Weill-organized and formatted, Digital Marketing for Dummies reflects most of the digital marketing concepts you’re looking for.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd

By Allan Dib | Amazon rating: 4.5/5 (2489 ratings)

If you’re running a business, planning is a must-have skill to make your marketing efforts work. As a serial entrepreneur and experienced marketer, Allan Dib knows how to convey a lot of knowledge about marketing plans in a straightforward and easy-to-follow format.

Even in the world of digital marketing, this book offers you lots of solid marketing advice on the actual implementation.

The author simplifies marketing concepts and demonstrates them with clear examples so readers can understand and apply easily.

Especially with one with no previous knowledge of marketing or business, this book can help you skip all the fluff and come up with practical ideas. Make the process of building marketing plans more simple and faster.

Social media marketing books

In the modern marketing world, social media becomes an indispensable part of any marketing strategy, from building brand awareness, sales to customer relationships.

It’s the easiest way for businesses to interact with their audience; however, this field is much harder for newbies to approach as its popularity.

There’re so many competitors using social media to marketing, so how could you make your business stand out of the crowd?

#GetSocialSmart: How to Hone Your Social Media Strategy

By Katie Lance | Amazon rating: 4.8/5 (85 ratings)

#GetSocialSmart helps readers identify the key platforms to focus on and know how to use social media effectively and optimize for each of your marketing strategies.

This book will be a comprehensive guide for entrepreneurs, small business owners as it includes plenty of tips for beginners to grasp the core of different media platforms.

However, experienced readers can still find many useful tips in this book with a wide range of information it covers.

Throughout the book, clear explanations lead the readers through every step of a social media strategy. You can learn how to use various social technologies (even live streams) to deliver your brand’s messages and nurture the relationships with your audience online.

Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business

By Pat Flynn | Amazon rating: 4.8/5 (331 ratings)

Customers, followers, and subscribers; those words are not something strange to us as we see them every day on the Internet.

As a marketer or business owner, they’re essential metrics illuminating a media marketing strategy’s results and influencing heavily a brand.

This book brings back a new concept of the brand’s followers - superfans. They are groups of customers who are willing to promote your brand and even send you encouraging emails when your business gets into trouble.

But the question is how to create “superfans”. This book shows you all the tips and tricks to win the customers’ love and turn them into advocates for your brand.

Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization (Que Biz-Tech)

By Blanchard Olivier | Amazon rating: 4.4/5 (90 ratings)

Nowadays, it’s not difficult to find a book written around the social media world. However, not all of them are informative, as they might be too vague. The Social Media ROI book goes there and further.

From the beginning of the book, all the social media programs to its execution are explained based on the ROI principles - the scale of business success. This makes the book stand out from others.

Blanchard keeps us on the right track and gives us many approaches and answers to the question - what is the ROI of social media?

This book will provide you with the best advice on how to earn more value from every dime you invest in social media.

Some modern digital marketing strategies and tactics

Email Marketing Rules: Checklists, Frameworks, and 150 Best Practices for Business Success

By Chad S. White | Amazon rating: 4.9/5 (74 ratings)

Not many books now can stand the test of time when it comes to writing about a marketing concept in the fast-changing and dynamic digital world.

Instead of being bogged down with soon to be out-of-date methodologies, the Email Marketing Rules of Chad is still informative and irreplaceable.

This book’s packed with 150 best practices and easy-to-follow processes to take advantage of the email marketing power to grow your business in the digital age. It covers everything about email marketing and teaches you how to apply it strategically and successfully.

It is a great book to take your email marketing up a new height, suitable for both freshers and experienced ones.

Affiliate Marketing: The Simple Way to Make Money Online

By Alan Carter | Amazon rating: 4.8/5 (24 ratings)

In this book, the author Alan does a great job providing detailed information about affiliate marketing with several tips and tricks you could apply in practice.

The book focuses not only on developing theoretical knowledge but also delivers practical examples with tips. Moreover, you can imagine the most frequent challenges you could face in the process of utilizing affiliate marketing for your business.

If you want to join the affiliate programs or use it in your overall marketing plan, this book is a great start for you. You can go through every main principle of the affiliate, from its definition, how it works, where to start, and difficulties you could meet.

However, this book is not the right selection with more experienced affiliates as they will have less to gain than the novice.

Marketing Analytics: A Practical Guide to Improving Consumer Insights Using Data Techniques

By Mike Grigsby | Amazon rating: 4.3/ 5 (14 ratings)

We’ve witnessed the rise of an equally important piece to the puzzle — marketing analytics.

The importance of analytics in marketing now is proven undeniable. However, the world of marketing analytics is not easy to understand with normal users.

The Marketing Analytics book provides clear, jargon-free explanations of how businesses can apply numerous analytical models for different marketing purposes.

Divided into five main parts, the book will take you through the world of analytics from how to collect information to practical applications into everyday use.

Though it’s a wonderful book filled with actionable insights and detailed explanations of each tool, this book is likely for those who want to dive deeper into analytics. Or else, you might find it overwhelming when having no prior related knowledge.

SEO For Dummies

By Peter Kent | Amazon rating: 4.7/5 (23 ratings)

If you’re a web owner, developer, or search engine optimizer, the “SEO” term is too familiar. SEO is still and always the utmost importance for any business that wants to be visible online.

However, SEO is a relatively complex undertaking that involves many different techniques, tactics, and practices. To conquer SEO is not an easy task.

SEO For Dummies has all the questions you need to know about SEO from basic to advanced. The author will show you how to create a web that ranks at the top of search engines with high-volume traffic.

Clear and understandable examples are used to illustrate each technique or tactic. Though SEO For Dummies is a great reference resource for freshers, this is not a step-by-step guide book.

So my advice for you is to self-prepare a little knowledge of HTML and web design skills before actually diving deep into this book.

Related posts:

• Best Online Marketing books
• Best Social Media Marketing Books
• Best Marketing Books every marketer need

Final thoughts

In the modern world, winning the customer requires the right technology and strategies.

To become number one in your market, above are the best digital marketing books you should read to understand current trends and effective strategies for your business’s long-term success.