A MARKETER’S READING LIST
A curated list of websites and people to follow to help kick-start a career in the realm of (digital) marketing.
In 2017, I had prepared this list (passing it via Email and Google Docs) to help interviewees prepare for Digital Marketing and Digital Sales roles. Later, I had found myself passing on this list to aspiring marketers and early entrepreneurs who didn’t know where to start (even beyond the scope of digital sales and marketing).
This list has been carefully compiled over a period of 8 years spent in reading, writing, observing and implementing marketing strategies for a wide range of products and services across diverse domains.
Blogs, Articles and Case Studies
- Dave McClure’s AARRR Pirate Metrics
- Optimizely and Unbounce’s Landing Page Optimization Case Studies
- Seth Godin’s Blog about understanding Users / Customers
- Sendgrid and MailChimp’s Reports on Email Content, Deliverability, Subject Lines and Best Practices
- Marketo and Hubspot’s Articles and Case Studies on Marketing Automation (Bonus: In-bound Marketing Set-up Best Practices)
- PriceIntelligently’s Patrick Campbell’s Blog on Pricing Strategies
- Steve Blank’s Blog on Customer Development
- Ash Maurya’s Articles on Setting-up Lean Processes
- Geckoboard’s Blog on Understanding Metrics and KPIs
- The Moz Blog on Digital Marketing
- Hiten Shah and Neil Patel’s Blogs about Online Sales, Lead Capture and Growth
- Content Marketing Institute’s articles on Content Strategy
- Noah Kagan’s OkDork Blog on Growth Hacking Techniques
- Andrew Chen’s Essays on Marketing and Growth
- Anum Hussain’s Presentations on Marketing
- UserOnboard’s UX Teardowns
- ReallyGoodEmails’ Best Emails Blog and Commentary
- Customer.io, Appcues, Kissmetrics and Intercom’s Blogs
- Sheena Iyengar, Tim Harford and Dan Ariley’s Blogs and Articles on Decision Making, Behavioral Economics and Psychology
Hands-On (Free)
- Fill Lean Canvas on Lean Stack
- Join and read GrowthHackers and Inbound
- Set-up Marketing Automation on Mautic
- Google Analytics Funnel Set-up
I often joke and suggest to those who are in early stages of their career — if they can read through the bulk of this list and start implementing marketing techniques hands-on, they would not need to read through another book on marketing again (or need to do a MBA in Marketing).
Pro Tip: For beginners, I suggest a 70:30 rule: 70% reading, 30% doing. Since the list is exhaustive and could become overwhelming, one of the ways to read is start from one of the listed topics and go deep. When you see the central idea of the topic repeating itself, change gears and go wide to another topic. As you keep following this approach, you will reach a stage where ~70% of the content you consume will start becoming repetitive. That would be a good time to shift to a 30:70 rule: 30% reading, 70% doing.
