How many likes? How many purchases? How many email subscribers? It's easy to get lost in the numbers. As entrepreneurs, we have to remember that there are people behind all that data. People who are looking for someone they trust, someone who has their best interests in mind. Pat Flynn shows a path to becoming that trustworthy person and creating a tribe of superfans around the world.
Running a business is all about solving problems, but business leaders often don't know what's their biggest problem. Instead of going in endless circles putting out urgent fires or prioritizing the wrong things, Mike Michalowicz provides a framework for identifying the most important problems based on a business' heirarchy of needs, and prioritizing to fix them first.
This book is a marketer's take on how influential blogs are in our lives become, and why that's something to worry about. Ryan Holiday outlines the parts of the internet that is broken, and includes detailed stories and confessions of his own on how he gamed the very same system to generate press for his clients.
Clayten Christensen seminal book is based on the Jobs to be done framework, and insight that when we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to make progress and get a job done. And if the product hired to do the job does it well, we hire it again. And if not, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. Christensen argues that when companies truly understand the job their customer is hiring their product or service to do, is when companies can drive innovative solutions forward.
Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. Seth Godin's book is a culmination of decades of experience to help people understand marketing and apply its core ideas to their own businesses. A must read book on marketing.
Bill Price and David Jaffe assert through their book that customer service is only needed when a company does something wrong, and therefore eliminating the need for customer service is the best way to have satisfied customers. Read their book to learn how to use their principles that teach you to use service as a data point for improving customer safisfaction.
