The 27 Best Marketing Books You Should Read in 2026

I have a love-hate relationship with marketing books.

They represent the most prominent improvement source for my career and my number 1 item in the “time wasted” bucket.

The reality is that most marketers have the idea that writing a book will be a great social proof for their consulting career and will make them look cool and trustworthy, boosting their perceived authority.

Amazon converting the book publishing process into a self-service experience that only takes a few clicks has worsened things. Now we’re bogged with hundreds if not thousands of new marketing books being published every month, most of which are totally worthless.

In the best case, they’ll waste your time. In the worst case, they’ll set you on the path to failure with terrible advice.

I’ll try to keep this list always up to date as I read more books and discover hidden gems. The current list was last updated in July 2026.

The 27 best marketing books at a glance

Short on time? Here’s every book on this list, who it’s for, and the one-line reason it earned a spot. Full reviews below.

Book	Best for	In one line
Lost and Founder	Founders	The painfully honest reality of building a company.
Predictably Irrational	Behavioral marketers	Why customers act irrationally, and how to use it.
Breakthrough Advertising	Copywriters	The deepest book ever written on demand and desire.
$100M Offers	SaaS & B2B conversion	Build an offer people feel stupid saying no to.
10x Marketing Formula	Content marketers	CoSchedule’s system for content that compounds.
Hooked	Product marketers	How products build habit-forming loops.
Traffic Secrets	Acquisition	Russell Brunson’s playbook for filling your funnel.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan	Small business	A full marketing plan on a single page.
Hacking Growth	Growth teams	The growth process from the people who named it.
Influence (New & Expanded)	Everyone	The six psychological levers of persuasion.
Obviously Awesome	SaaS positioning	A step-by-step process to nail positioning.
Don’t Make Me Think	UX & web	The classic on making sites obvious to use.
High Impact Content Marketing	Content marketers	Defining content that actually performs.
Content Inc	Creators & founders	Build the audience first, the product second.
Product-Led Growth	SaaS	Let the product drive acquisition and expansion.
Blue Ocean Strategy	Strategists	Compete by creating uncontested market space.
The Customer Centricity Playbook	Retention & CLV	Winning on customer lifetime value.
Everybody Writes	Anyone who writes	The go-to guide to good business writing.
Building a StoryBrand 2.0	Messaging	Clarify your message so customers listen.
Product-Led SEO	SaaS SEO	Treat SEO as a product, not a content treadmill.
The Ultimate Marketing Engine	Agencies & strategy	Build your marketing around ideal customers.
Moving to Outcomes	Partnership marketers	Why partnerships are the future of performance.
Forget the Funnel	PLG & SaaS	Reach customers by moment, not funnel stage.
Marketing Artificial Intelligence	Marketing leaders	The ‘why’ of AI in marketing.
The AI Marketing Canvas	Marketing leaders	A five-step roadmap to actually adopt AI.
Audacious	Brand & creative	How humans win in an AI-flooded market.
Very Good Copy	Copywriters	Short, sharp lessons on copy that converts.

What does a great marketing book look like?

There’s no easy way to quickly identify the best marketing books; there are those you should read and those you should skip altogether.

There’s also no single definition of a great marketing book; it really depends on your current skill set and where’s your company at in terms of growth, strategy, team size, and focus.

Let’s list some key indicators to look for in a book to understand if it’s a good fit for you.

Strategy vs. tactics

When it comes to books, I usually prefer to buy and read books focusing on marketing strategy rather than actionable guides on how to do something.

The rationale is simple, in the current online marketing landscape, tactics change too fast for a book to stay on top of the latest trends. By the time it’s published, most tactics could be outdated.

Blogs and communities are the places to get the latest tactics. Marketing books are better suited to provide you with high-level strategies. Some still have an expiration date attached to them, and some are evergreen.

You’ll notice some of the best marketing books I’m recommending here are even as old as 50 years old! However, They all focus on key marketing strategies rather than “How to use the Facebook Ads Manager.”

Target audience

Who’s the book for? Often the author is pretty upfront about defining who the book is written for.

For example, Lost and Founder, not strictly a marketing book, but written by a great marketer and with some beneficial marketing insights inside, is a book I feel is the best fit for startup co-founders and marketing executives.

The Revenue Marketing book is another example that falls in this bucket. It’s a great book, but the best fit for it is a marketing executive who has the vision and power to implement drastic organizational changes.

Other books are written with marketers in mind that will have to implement the marketing strategy or part of it.

Stage and industry of the company

Marketing professionals can get excited easily. More than once, I’ve seen marketers in early-stage startups go off-road because they tried to follow pieces of advice from a book that was clearly meant for later-stage companies with a larger budget, firepower, and team size.

Marketing books rarely focus on a specific company stage or industry.

It’s up to you to understand if a book is a good fit for you and the business you work for. Check the author’s bio. Have they always worked in large enterprises? Did he focus more on B2B or B2C in his career?

This is not a show stopper, and you’ll likely never find the perfect book describing marketing strategies for your growth stage and industry, but this doesn’t mean a book is not good or worth reading. It’s up to you to put what you’re reading in context and then prioritize only the parts that can have the most significant impact on your business.

Digital Marketing is full of opportunities. It’s your job as a marketing professional to understand what has the highest potential impact and prioritize it.

Red Flags

Well, the list here could be endless. You can start reading Amazon reviews… but they can be easily manipulated.

Other red flags can come from the author’s bio. I try to avoid books from authors that have no real-world track record. For a book to be good, usually, it needs to be written by someone who has first-hand experience with what he’s writing about. Otherwise, it’s usually a summary/medley of other marketing books and blog posts.

Of course, having a deep understanding of a topic doesn’t guarantee you’re able to expose it in a book clearly.

The best marketing books, in my view.

Sorry for the long intro. I know you’re here to get inspiration for the next book about digital marketing to read, not to read a guide on how to pick a book. Let’s get down to it!

The books in this section are all books I’ve read and can personally vouch for. Later on, you’ll find more suggestions from friends and industry experts.

Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Lost & Founder” is not strictly a marketing book, but it’s written by a great marketer, Rand Fishkin, former CEO & Co-Founder of Moz, and now at the helm of SparkToro.

While the book is a very personal narration of Rand’s adventure as a Startup founder, it’s still filled with excellent marketing advice and covers the whole lifetime of Moz, so you’ll see how things can change as the business grows.

As an example, Rand tells his tales with what we call Growth hacking and how most of the time, it resulted in short-term gains that, however, had a negative impact in the long term. Something I’ve experienced first-hand too.

Overall if you are a marketer in the SaaS space, it’s a very insightful and entertaining book.

Pages: 300
Price: $5.99
Year: 2018
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Predictably Irrational

I’ve read this book countless times and fell in love with it right away. It’s probably one of the books I’ve handed out as a gift the most.

Dan Ariely is not only one of the world’s top behavioral scientists, but he’s also a great teacher and communicator. His books are insightful, filled with real-world experiments and case studies, and highly entertaining.

“Predictably Irrational” is a book about how our brains work and why we make irrational decisions, especially while thinking we’re hyper-rational. Many of the book chapters focus on our buying behavior and are backed by Ariely’s research.

As an example, do you know the most essential emotion when buying something? It’s Fear. When we don’t buy something, it’s because of fear. That’s why the word “Free” is so powerful, and it removes fear.

Even if he never mentions marketing across the book, once you’ve finished reading it, you’ll have a considerable amount of ideas on how to fine-tune your marketing messages, improve your landing pages and commercial offer, hook users to your product better and faster.

Trust me. This is one of the best marketing books you’ll ever read.

Pages: 302
Price: $8.90
Year: 2009
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Breakthrough Advertising

“Breakthrough Advertising” is considered by many a sort of Bible of copywriting. For a long time, it’s also been known as “The lost book.” It was impossible to find and used Amazon copies sold for crazy amounts like $400. And honestly, it was worth it.

Don’t worry, and you won’t have to hand out $400 to get ahold of this book. It’s now being republished by Brian Kurtz, even tho’ at $125, it’s still the most expensive book on this list.

Forget about CPC, CTR, Facebook Ads, and Display advertising. This book was written by Gene Schwartz in 1966 when the only forms of advertising were direct mailing and newspaper ads.

Luckily, while advertising channels have changed in the last 60 years, customer behavior has not.

Also, note this is not strictly a book around advertising, and I’d say the main focus is helping you understand why people buy and crafting the perfect marketing message to make it happen.

All of Gene Schwartz’s ideas have survived wee in the digital age and are arguably even more impactful today than then.

One of my favorite quotes from this book is, “A Marketer’s goal is not to create old into new desires in potential customers. Creating new desires would be incredibly expensive and hard. Your job as a marketer or business owner is to understand people, discover the desires that already exist, and leverage them for your marketing strategy.”

This is an evergreen masterpiece to step up your marketing game.

Pages: 236
Price: $125
Year: 1966
Get on the book’s website

To give you an idea of how good this book is, here’s how much original used copies are selling for on Amazon:

$100M Offers

I resisted this one for a while. Alex Hormozi’s personal brand is loud, the YouTube thumbnails are… a lot, and I assumed the book would be more hype than substance. I was wrong.

“$100M Offers” is the best thing I’ve read on how to build an offer people feel stupid saying no to. Forget traffic and funnels for a second. If your offer is weak, no amount of clever lead generation will save you.

Hormozi breaks down what he calls the “value equation”: dream outcome, perceived likelihood of success, time delay, and effort. Push the top of that fraction up, shrink the bottom, and suddenly price stops being the conversation your prospects want to have.

It’s short, it’s blunt, and every chapter is immediately actionable. If you’re in SaaS or B2B and your problem is conversion rather than clicks, start here before you touch your ad account again.

Pages: 164
Price: $23.92
Year: 2021
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10x Marketing Formula

If you love inbound marketing and content marketing, you’re going to love the “10x Marketing formula” (Not to be confused with “10x” by Grant Cardone).

This book is from Garrett Moon, co-founder of Co-Schedule, and you can find a great intro to the approach proposed in the book reading this post.

The core idea is that your marketing success will unlikely depend on many small wins but will be driven more by 10x jumps that will significantly impact.

Given this incipit, the book focuses on how you can build, analyze and optimize a predictable marketing strategy based on bold moves that sometimes will fail, but when they don’t, will have an enormous impact on your business.

The book put a lot of emphasis on content marketing, one of my favorite approaches for scaling SaaS businesses. The author has battle-tested all the strategies presented on CoSchedule’s blog, and social media marketing is also covered quite often.

TL;DR: If you’re planning a digital marketing strategy for a SaaS Business, make sure you read this book, it often goes under the radar in “best marketing books” lists, but it’s totally worth it!

Pages: 368
Price: $0.99
Year: 2018
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Hooked

“Hooked“ by Nir Eyal is a bestseller worldwide. It’s the Bible on how radically successful businesses build habit-forming products.

Yes, products, not marketing campaigns. This book is not strictly about Marketing and more about hooking users in your product, creating stickiness, increasing retention, and converting them into loyal customers.

It’s probably the best book in this space and if you’re working in product marketing is a must-read. As I’ve discussed when talking about revenue marketing, SaaS business leaders should break down silos and have all the teams work together.

The topics covered in this book are also strategic to approach a Product Led Growth (PLG) strategy.

Pages: 256
Price: $16.85
Year: 2014
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Traffic Secrets

“Traffic Secrets” by marketing legend Russel Brunson is another book that is often not mentioned in book recommendations. In my opinion, it’s absolutely one of the best marketing books around, and it’s based on Russel’s first-hand experience scaling a digital business from $0 to $100m without raising any VC money.

The book is really up to date, and it’s been published in 2020 and does a great job covering both marketing strategies and tactics.

It explains step by step how ClickFunnel generates traffic, converts it into leads while already making money out of it, and then into new customers.

And it doesn’t stop here. A key part of this book is also how to maximize Lifetime Value with upsells and keep making more money from existing customers.

Everything starts with content and how it can be repurposed across multiple channels, from Youtube to Social Media, books, and so on.

The book itself is a lead magnet for ClickFunnel. I learned a lot by reading the book and analyzing how the book is promoted and used to promote the business.

Some of the tactics described are pretty unconventional in classic SaaS Marketing, but they’re certainly very effective. The only caveat you should keep in mind is that they are so effective for ClickFunnel because of Russel’s powerful personal brand.

Pages: 347
Price: $9.99
Year: 2020
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The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd

I read this book by Allan Dib 6 years ago during my AdEspresso time, and I remember I loved it.

It’s probably the first book everyone in SaaS or B2B Marketing should read as it provides an actionable guide to every step of the funnel required in an effective marketing plan.

The book is divided into three main blocks: Before, during, and after.

The Before phase covers critical activities you should do before going to market with a new business, defining your target market, crafting your message and story, and researching potential customers with advertising.

The During phase covers capturing, nurturing, and conversion to paying customers.

The After phase focuses on delivering a world-class customer experience to maximize lifetime value.

It’s a great high-level guide to planning your marketing efforts. This is also the book’s main problem, and it leaves it to you to come up with tactics to execute the plan. Another issue I found in this book is that it doesn’t cover the traffic acquisition phase too much and focuses more on lead generation.

It’s still a great book, well worth being listed as one of the best marketing books!

Pages: 234
Price: $2.99
Year: 2016
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Hacking Growth

“Hacking Growth” is likely the best book on Growth Hacking, written by two of the top names in the growth hacking world: Sean Ellis, who invented the term, and Morgan Brown, who worked with Sean and then became director of product at Facebook and now VP of growth of Shopify.

Clearly, they do what they preach.

The book is a pleasure to read, and it’s structured in two macro sections. The first one is a good intro to growth hacking and how to implement a good process in your company to make assumptions, quickly test, analyze and improve them before moving on to the next experiment.

In my opinion, this is exactly what most marketers need: a good process to iterate through a series of experiments and analyze their impact.

The second part of the book is more tactical and filled with case studies and real-world examples of how you can start adopting growth hacking to grow your company.

For sure, it deserves a spot on my best marketing books list!

Pages: 300
Price: $12.99
Year: 2017
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Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion

This bestseller and evergreen marketing book by Robert Cialdini is like the Bible when it comes to understanding why people say “yes” and leveraging it to grow your business.

Please don’t get fooled by the title, the book is not strictly about influencer marketing, and it’s actually very focused on the psychology that drives us to say yes. From this point of view, it’s pretty similar to predictably irrational.

Even though it was written in the 80s; it’s still a great read and actually still very relevant; Human behavior doesn’t change that fast!

I love this book because it’s filled with great examples, and they’re all incredibly actionable. In every chapter, you could find some gems to test right away on your homepage or landing pages.

There’s also a chapter on social proof. I love social proof, and I’ve experimented in Facebook Ads how powerful it is. And while it’s used by most companies nowadays, I think it’s very often used in an insufficient or ineffective way.

Pages: 592
Price: $16.99
Year: 2021
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Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

If I could force every SaaS founder to read one book on positioning, this would be it. Not a maybe. This one.

April Dunford spent years positioning B2B tech products, and “Obviously Awesome” is the distilled playbook. Most companies think positioning is a tagline you brainstorm in an afternoon. It’s not. It’s the context you place your product in so the right people instantly get why it matters to them.

She gives you an actual step-by-step process: identify your true competitive alternatives, isolate the attributes that make you different, map them to the value customers actually care about, then pick the market frame that makes that value obvious.

I’ve watched products with genuinely great tech die because nobody could tell what they were. “Obviously Awesome” is the antidote, and it pairs perfectly with the work I describe in my B2B SaaS marketing guide. Short, practical, zero fluff.

Pages: 202
Price: $12.55
Year: 2019
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Don’t Make Me Think

This classic from Steve Krug is an evergreen success and should be read by anyone in marketing dealing with the website’s design.

The concept is clear from the title: simplicity is the most important element of any website, no matter if you’re working on the homepage or a landing page.

Too many companies nowadays focus on creative designs rather than web usability. While it might be suitable for branding, it can kill your conversion rate.

The target audience is mainly composed of designers, and it teaches them how to counter-argue with the marketing team and business leaders asking for nonsense designs.

As a marketer, it’s a great idea to read it to better judge website designs and be more aligned with your design team.

Pages: 210
Price: $16.20
Year: 2013
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High Impact Content Marketing

This is the book every marketer I know has been recommending in the last year.

The author, Purna Virji, is a seasoned marketer, keynote speaker and her current title is Principal Consultant, Content Solutions at LinkedIn.

The book is easy to read and lays out many simple and actionable frameworks to produce high-quality content that has a real business impact across the customer journey.

In a world where many companies are still using dinosaur strategies when it comes to content marketing, Purna does a great job defining what “high-quality content” really means and how to produce them at scale to compete with modern content creators.

Here’s what I loved about this book:

• It’s multi-channel, it teaches how to produce great content across video, audio, social, and blogs.
• It covers both high-level content strategies AND actionable tactics
• It’s well-researched and full of case studies.

Well, high impact content marketing really deserves to be listed among the top marketing books for 2026 and it’s a must-read if you are a content marketer.

Pages: 352
Price: $21.66
Year: 2023
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Content Inc

Joe Pulizzi is an authority in the field of content marketing, he was among the first to use the term back in 2001, and he’s the founder of Content Marketing Institute, one of the best blogs on the topic.

In “Content Inc,” he does a great job at helping small businesses understand how content marketing works, set realistic expectations, and plan great marketing campaigns.

Most people think about Content Marketing as something very blog-centric. I love this book because it focuses on how to create content that fits your expertise and your potential customer’s interests and needs; it doesn’t focus on a single distribution channel.

The second edition is actually very up-to-date. It was released in 2021 and featured a lot of social media marketing tips covering all the latest trends like TikTok and Snapchat.

Pages: 432
Price: $14.34
Year: 2021
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Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself

Product-Led Growth is the trend of the moment in online marketing, and it’s becoming marketers’ favorite buzzword replacing growth hacking.

Wes Bush, the author of the book, is one of the most well-known names in the space and his website, ProductLed, is an excellent source of education on the subject.

PLG’s approach is to basically use your product as a Marketing channel by onboarding as many users as possible in a Free or Trial plan and then optimizing the user experience to have high conversion rates, delight new customers, and incentivize them to refer more customers.

The book is filled with practical advice on picking your business model, optimizing your user experience, reducing churn, and so on. It’s really a great intro to get started with Product-led growth.

Of course, the book has a strong focus on the SaaS space. While it would be an interesting read, it’s probably not a must-read if you’re in the eCommerce space.

If you’ll like this book as much as I did, there’s also an excellent follow-up that focuses 100% on SaaS onboarding titled Product-led Onboarding.

Pages: 278
Price: $9.99
Year: 2019
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Blue Ocean Strategy

I actually read this book a long time ago, but it left an impact, and I remember it was pretty good. I’d say it’s more for entrepreneurs than for marketers, though.

The big idea behind this bestseller is to guide readers to find untapped opportunities in the market where competition is low, and you can really grow your business. These markets are called ‘blue oceans,’ and they represent a way more appealing opportunity than bloody red oceans of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.

Pages: 320

Price: $16.20

Year: 2015

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The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Driven by Customer Lifetime Value

It is not strictly a Marketing book but a title that can have a transformational effect on businesses and their marketing teams.

Customer-centric companies really put the customer at the center of all their efforts, from marketing to product, customer support, and success. The Customers are no longer an anonymous monolith but have become a known entity, and his success is the goal of the business.

Pages: 136
Price: $19.99
Year: 2018
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Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

I’ve heard just too many praises for “Everybody Writes” not to include it in this list, and I’m going to read it for sure.

The book is very business and online marketing focused and will help you become a better copywriter to craft stellar content that will attract, convert and retain customers for your business.

In my personal opinion copywriting is a very underrated skill nowadays. Every startup is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get their website designed by a pro, but when it comes to the copy: “There’s no budget… the CEO or the intern will take care of it”.

This is totally wrong; I can assure you that the copy has a way bigger impact than the design in most cases.

Pages: 320
Price: $21.34
Year: 2014
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Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

The original “Building a StoryBrand” is one of those books everyone in marketing has either read or quietly lied about reading. In January 2025 Donald Miller shipped a full 2.0 rewrite, so it earns a fresh spot on this list.

The core idea hasn’t changed, and it doesn’t need to: your customer is the hero of the story, not your brand. You’re the guide. Most companies get this backwards and make themselves the star of every message, and then wonder why nobody cares.

Miller hands you the StoryBrand framework, a seven-part structure to clarify your message so people instantly understand what you do and why it should matter to them. The 2.0 edition refreshes the examples and folds in their AI tooling.

It’s on the simple side for advanced marketers, and the framework can feel formulaic if you follow it too literally. But for getting a confused team aligned around one clear message, I still haven’t found anything better.

Pages: 304
Price: $16.89
Year: 2025
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Product-Led SEO

I found “Product-Led SEO” to be an incredibly valuable resource for improving my company’s search engine optimization strategy. The author, Eli Schwartz, provides practical advice and strategies for optimizing not only our website but also our product itself to attract organic traffic and increase conversions.

What I particularly liked about the book was how it emphasized the importance of designing the product with the user in mind. The book provided actionable tips for incorporating user research and feedback into the product development process, as well as optimizing the product’s UI and features for better search engine visibility.

Overall, “Product-Led SEO” was a comprehensive guide to optimizing your SaaS product for search engines. I would highly recommend it to other founders and marketers looking to improve their SEO strategy.

Pages: 262
Price: $10.59
Year: 2021
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 The Ultimate Marketing Engine

I read “The Ultimate Marketing Engine” earlier this year, and absolutely agree with John Jantsch.

The ultimate marketing engine for your company is a happy customer that would give you a deep referral in a heartbeat. Jantsch gets programmatic about this, and gives us 5 clear and actionable steps to turn your customers into ambassadors.

Some of these include deep insights into mapping your customer painpoints, uncovering real problems you can solve, and narrowing focus on customers who both need and can pay for your product. Scaling this process involves a deep obsession with solving for these customer ecosystems.

I also appreciated how the author focused not just on tactics, but also on the importance of creating a marketing culture within the organization.

Definitely worth a read especially if you’re trying to figure out the marketing ethos for your company. 

Pages: 224
Price: $11.24
Year: 2021
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Moving to Outcomes: Why Partnerships are the Future of Marketing

I thought this book was above average. While not all of it is valuable, there were some very clear insights on how to drive partnership marketing.

I do believe that Marketing ROI should be a priority for SaaS companies, especially during a recession. This book is a great entry point on how to drive outcome based partnership marketing to success.

Glazer and Wool spend considerable time making a case for their point through use-cases, and analysis of companies that have done this successfully.

The central point is simple: In order to achieve a better return on investment and sustainable long-term performance, brands should consider diversifying their marketing strategies by allocating more budget towards scalable and transparent marketing partnerships. 

My only gripe is that it would have benefitted from talking more about the major pricing and performance rules that underlie these partnerships.
That said, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in “diversifying their marketing portfolio” beyond the mainstream. 

Pages: 224
Price: $3.64
Year: 2022
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Forget the funnel

This book is so good for SaaS marketers that as soon as I started reading it, I’ve decided to update this post and add it.

Forget the funnel is literally fresh out of press, it was released on May 9th, 2023 and is the brainchild of Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop.

The two authors have a huge experience in SaaS Marketing. They’ve worked in amazing companies like Unbounce & Calendly and played a key role in scaling them in the early days.

They then partnered to found “Forget the Funnel” a San Francisco agency helping top SaaS companies scale their growth.

I had a couple of calls with them in the past for Breadcrumbs, and I can guarantee you, they’re very smart and know what they’re talking about.

This book will teach you the exact approach they use to help their customer. And it’s a very unconventional approach that I love.

Instead of burning out your marketing team by going after endless tactics that might or might not work for your company and industry, they put all the focus of marketing, product, and sales team on customers.

This amazing marketing book will teach you how to identify your best customers and how to interview them to understand what got them to buy your product, how they discovered it, how they were doing things before your product, and how using it made their life better.

Once you have this information, you’ll learn how to use them to drastically change how you do marketing and sales. Not by chasing the latest marketing tactics, but by implementing a customer-focused approach that will make your growth organic and predictable.

You know how much I respect Rand Fishking, here’s what he had to say about Forget the Funnel:

“My team paid tens of thousands of dollars to work with Claire and Gia, and we earned every dollar back tenfold. This book shows exactly how they did it and how you can too.” 

Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro

Pages: 149
Price: $0.99
Year: 2023
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Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business

Ok … I’ve been a bit puzzled to decide if I should list this book among the best Marketing books in 2026.

Paul Roetzer, the author is the CEO of the Marketing AI institute and has a great understanding of how AI can be applied to Marketing. I found it a good book, but has not been as impactful for me as other books in this list.

On the other hand, I see Marketing teams restructured and hit by layoffs across most SaaS companies, often because of misconceptions about AI and how much it can replace marketers. I also see a lot of confusion across Exec teams on how much AI can really impact marketing.

That’s what drove me to add this book to the list. It does a great job at explaining what AI can and cannot do to help marketing teams and provides a solid framework to start deploying it across the funnel with reasonable expectations. This is something every company, no matter the size or industry should have a roadmap for.

Pages: 256
Price: $12.99
Year: 2023
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The AI Marketing Canvas: A Five-Step AI Plan for Marketers

If Roetzer’s book above is the “why” of AI in marketing, this one is the “how.”

Rajkumar Venkatesan (professor at Darden) and Jim Lecinski (ex-Google, the “Zero Moment of Truth” guy) give you an actual five-step roadmap to go from a pile of random AI experiments to a real, sequenced plan. The second edition, out in 2026, is rewritten around generative AI rather than just the predictive stuff.

What I appreciate is that it isn’t breathless hype. It’s structured: pick your use cases, sequence your predictive and generative work, and build some governance before you scale so you don’t create a mess you’ll regret.

If you’re a marketing leader who has to present an AI roadmap to your exec team and then actually defend it, read this one first.

Pages: 282
Price: $24.74
Year: 2026
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Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World

Here’s my worry about marketing in 2026: as every team floods every channel with AI-generated content, everything starts to look the same. Same posts, same “valuable” blog articles, same tone. A great grey ocean of sameness.

Mark Schaefer’s answer in “Audacious” is the opposite of what most AI books preach. He argues the winners won’t be the ones who automate the most, but the ones brave enough to be human, weird, and impossible to ignore.

The book is a collection of case studies of brands that broke the mold, plus a framework to disrupt three parts of your story: the narrative, the platform, and the storyteller.

I don’t agree with every page, and a few case studies feel a little cherry-picked. But the core thesis is one I believe in deeply: in a world of infinite AI content, the scarce resource is human courage.

Pages: 289
Price: $19.99
Year: 2025
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Very Good Copy

Eddie Shleyner is one of my favorite copywriters and host of the amazing newsletter Very Good Copy which gives the title to the book. He’s been helping copywriters around the world for a long time now and finally, he has put together all his amazing content in this book released in the summer of 2024.

The book is a collection of 207 micro-lessons on copywriting, usually under 500 words. They are divided into 2 parts.

The first half of the book is about thinking like a copywriter: where to find inspiration, what your true job is as a copywriter, how to capture real-world emotions and stories to use in your copy.

The second part is about writing and is more practical on how to craft a great copy.

Mind you, this is not a book about how to become a great writer. This is highlighted in many of the micro lessons. This is a book about copywriting. The copywriter’s goal is to convert readers into customers, not write entertaining stories.

I truly believe that while AI is gonna replace most content writers, the art of copy writing, crafting emotional messages that trigger actions, will become more critical than ever in the upcoming years. It’s also a core skill of great marketers.

Overall “Very Good Copy” is a joy to read. Incredibly well-written and full of real-world anecdotes and quotes. I think every marketer should read it.

Pages: 480
Price: $24.99 ($9.99 on Kindle)
Year: 2024
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Tip #1: Leverage Book summaries

I’ve been using Book summary apps quite often in the last period.

Is it worth it? Yes and no.

I think you should read the full book regarding the pillars included in this best marketing books list.

On the other side, many other books are interesting but too long or written in a very boring way but still deserve attention. I often skim through the summary for these books and then decide if they are worth reading fully or not.

I can get a good overview of the book’s key concepts in about 20% of the time. Other times I love the summary and want to read the original edition.

Tip #2: It’s all about learning, not reading

I’m a compulsive buyer. I have something like 70+ books in my kindle that I still have to go through.

When I started, I was using the number of books read in a year as my north star metric, going after all those tweets stressing out that successful people used to read hundreds of books per year. Trust me, when it comes to books, quality matters more than quantity.

With time I understood that while the more you can read, the better it is, the end goal is not reading but improving yourself, taking the time to think about what you’ve just learned, and putting it into practice.

You won’t get less stressed reading a book about meditation if you don’t follow up and start meditating and you won’t become a better marketer if you don’t experiment with the strategies or tactics you’ve just learned.

My advice is: Take your time. It’s ok to read 5 books instead of 20 as long as those 5 books really impact your personal growth.

Love Reading? Here are more recommendations

• Best Leadership Books
• Best Sales Books
• Best Startup Books
• Best AI Books

Final disclaimer: some of these links might be affiliate, which means I’ll earn a few cents if you buy the book… don’t worry, it doesn’t affect the quality of the selection. Amazon has all the books anyway ;)