9 Best Growth Marketing Books to Read in 2024

Growth marketers looking to expand skill sets—here are the best growth marketing books to add to your reading list.

Every company needs to hire a growth marketer. Yes, you.

As a growth marketer, you already know this. You’re versatile, curious, and dynamic while taking on everything from customer acquisition and lifecycle marketing to communications, brand development, and customer research. Organizations hire you for your ability to wear several hats and succeed with all of them.

You’re always looking to expand your skill set, right? After all, this is what separates growth marketers from everyone else. It’s your appetite to continue gaining knowledge and rethinking strategy, which in turn rapidly accelerates business growth.

To stay on top of your craft, we’ve created a list of the best growth marketing books to read.

9 Must-Read Growth Marketing Books to Add to Your Reading List

Growth marketers adopt a founder-like mindset, and you’ll notice this theme in several of the books on the list. You may also notice ‘growth hacking’ pop up in a couple of the books. While the term isn’t part of a growth marketer’s lexicon much anymore, its principles are as relevant as ever.

Our picks for the best growth marketing books cover much more than tactical, how-to topics. You’ll gain an understanding of how to approach growth marketing from leaders with deep experience, covering a range of topics to inspire your next steps.

Here are the must-read growth marketing books of 2024.

Growth Levers and How to Find Them

• Author: Matt Lerner
• Where to read: Amazon

Matt Lerner, the author of Growth Levers, spent more than a decade with PayPal and, since 2018, has helped over 200 startups grow as much as 100x with his own consultancy firm, SYSTM. To that end, it’s safe to say Lerner has the credentials that growth marketers can trust.

Growth Levers argues that paid advertising, SEO, and referral programs—the tactics marketers normally turn to—aren’t enough to accelerate growth. Lerner explains that explosive growth actually comes from identifying your company’s unique growth levers, actions taken that trigger a surge in customer acquisition and retention.

Here’s what the four-part framework includes:

1. Map your growth model to find points of leverage
2. Uncover your customers’ unconscious biases and triggers
3. Run growth sprints to find the most impactful work
4. Shift the team from perfectionism to a scrappy bold mindset

Lerner provides examples and step-by-step instructions, too. And if there’s one thing to take away from Growth Levers, it’s that you should never waste time on small stuff once you experiment and identify your growth levers.

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

• Authors: Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown
• Where to read: Amazon

Hacking Growth is “the definitive playbook” for the methodology used by many of today’s most popular brands: growth hacking.

In the book, Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown examine how none of the brands you know and love transformed into powerhouses overnight. Instead, they relied on growth hacking to attract customers and increase market share over time. Airbnb, for example, focused on travel hackers and couch surfers in its earliest days; now, it’s competing directly with massive hotel chains.

Ellis and Brown remind readers that growth hacking requires a custom-made strategy. But the common thread between all growth hacking strategies is iterating with a continued focus on customers. Attaining, retaining, engaging, and motivating customers should always remain the primary objective.

Standout Startup: The Founder’s Guide to Irresistible Marketing That Fuels Growth

• Author: Allyson Letteri
• Where to read: Amazon

Standout Startup offers guidance for unlocking effective messaging, creating standout product positioning, defining a brand personality customers love, crafting compelling value propositions, and designing conversion-friendly content throughout the funnel. In the book, Allyson Letteri reinforces her ideas with examples and templates for other growth marketers to follow.

Letteri wrote Standout Startup using her experience as a growth marketing leader at Intuit, Thumbtack, and Handshake.

Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth

• Author: John Doerr
• Where to read: Amazon

Measure What Matters lands on our list of the best growth marketing books, but it’s also one of the best books for any professional to read. It helps organizations and teams “aim high, move fast, and excel.”

John Doerr explores the use of objectives and key results (OKRs), which virtually every organization uses in some form today, to inform decision-making. He introduced the concept to a 40-person Google in 1999, and since then, dozens of companies—from tech giants to charities—have adopted OKRs with his help.

In writing Measure What Matters, Doerr makes his approach and learnings available to everyone.

Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses

• Author: Nancy Harhut
• Where to read: Amazon

Nancy Harhut’s Using Behavioral Science in Marketing instructs growth marketers to increase engagement, response rates, and return on investment (ROI) by capitalizing on “hardwired consumer behavior and instinctive responses.” She highlights this approach using AT&T, Apple, and Spotify as case studies.

“Using Behavioral Science in Marketing shows how to apply behavioral science principles in key areas of marketing, including marketing communications, email, direct mail, ad campaigns, social media marketing and sales funnel conversion strategies,” the book’s description reads.

Harhut ends each chapter with common mistakes and key takeaways, and Using Behavioral Science in Marketing also includes checklists and templates for growth marketers to use in their own roles.

$100M Leads: How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff

• Author: Alex Hormozi
• Where to read: Amazon

Whereas most of the picks for best growth marketing books focus on approaches and mindsets, $100M Leads earns a spot on our list for getting into the weeds to share lead generation tips and tactics.

Acquisition.com’s Alex Hormozi wrote the book, filling it with insights gained from a portfolio of companies generating over 20,000 new leads daily and more than $200 million in revenue annually. Hormozi shares an ad framework to attract customers, a hook-retain-reward system to convert leads, and “everything else that got our companies boatloads of leads…fast.”

If you’re looking for immediate inspiration to fuel your next campaign, start experimenting with the tactics laid out in $100M Leads.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future PR, Marketing, and Advertising

• Author: Ryan Holiday
• Where to read: Amazon

Growth Hacker Marketing, like Hacking Growth earlier in this list, states that scaling a brand into a high-growth business takes repeated modification until “explosive reactions” occur.

Ryan Holiday outlines the new rules that marketers need to embrace. “A growth hacker doesn’t see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself. The product is then kick-started, shared, and optimized (with these steps repeated multiple times),” he says.

Although released a decade ago, Growth Hacker Marketing remains one of the best growth marketing books to read in 2024. Holiday has even updated the book with new case studies of startups and small businesses.

The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI

• Authors: Paul Leonardi, Tsedal Neeley
• Where to read: Amazon

Ask the right questions, make smart decisions, and appreciate new possibilities. Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley aim for you to accomplish all three after reading The Digital Mindset, which isn’t a marketing-focused book but one that all growth marketers can learn from.

OpenAI and other companies are introducing technological breakthroughs “changing how work gets done, how industries are structured, and how people from all walks of life work, behave, and relate to each other.” So, are you prepared for this digital revolution?

The Digital Mindset names collaboration, computation, and change as the pillars for readers to develop digital skills around.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

• Authors: Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
• Where to read: Amazon

Traction is a tactics-focused book for growth marketers. It explores the 19 channels for building a customer base and how to pick the most appropriate channels for your business. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares write that success comes with consistent growth and the acquisition of new customers, not with the originality of offerings or how much money is raised.

“Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path,” the book’s description proclaims.

Why You Should Read the Best Growth Marketing Books

Growth marketing is crucial. It goes beyond just attracting customers; growth marketing also focuses on retaining them and maximizing their value. By strategically nurturing your audience, growth marketing fuels sustainable business expansion.

In 2024, read the best growth marketing books for the following reasons:

1. Learn the latest trends and techniques: Growth marketing evolves constantly, so you want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and techniques. Reading the best growth marketing books allows you to understand the challenges you may face and the solutions to overcome them. As a result, you’ll have a competitive advantage to accelerate business growth.
2. Get inspired by successful leaders and companies: In the best growth marketing books, you’re gleaning a wealth of knowledge from founders, marketers, and other entrepreneurial professionals who’ve accomplished what you’re aiming to do. Adapt their ideas and strategies for your business to move closer to hitting those key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ve locked in on.
3. Develop a data-driven approach to marketing: You’re already aware that growth marketing is all about using data to track results and optimize campaigns, but the growth marketing books on our list empower you to do that even better.

Diving into the best growth marketing books equips you with the latest strategies and frameworks used by successful companies. You'll learn from practical case studies and gain insights into consumer behavior, allowing you to craft effective marketing campaigns that drive user acquisition and retention. By staying ahead of the curve with the knowledge from these books, you'll be better positioned to achieve explosive growth for your business.

Ready to supercharge growth marketing in 2024? Get in touch with Right Side Up to find the perfect growth marketer to take your strategy from 0 to 1 or a whole new level.