5 Books to Read About Attracting Online Audiences

Five classic books still map the stack for attracting online audiences: sticky ideas, inbound discovery, likable social proof, social ROI, and web analytics. Pair them with newer operator manuals such as Meta CMO Alex Schultz's 2025 Click Here when channels shift.

• Why it matters: Hiring specialists is easier when leaders share a common language for messages, channels, and measurement.
• How it works: Made to Stick supplies six traits of memorable ideas that marketers can test in posts and landing pages.
• What's next: Schultz's Click Here (on sale 7 Oct 2025) focuses on digital marketing, advertising, testing, and incremental growth.
• By the numbers: Metricool's Social Media Study 2026 reviewed more than 39 million posts from over a million accounts.
• The bottom line: Read the classics for principles, then refresh tactics against current platform and measurement data.

Knowing how to hire a copywriter, webmaster, and social media manager is a great start to the process of building and maintaining an online audience for your small-to-medium business. However, if you are just starting out in the SMB world or are interested in becoming an expert in attracting online audiences, there are several great reads on the market. Some are focused on online marketing, while others help you think outside of the box in terms of attracting potential customers in any format.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t

As the title suggests, this book discusses the birth of business ideas, what makes them successful, and ways to ensure they have a quick death. Authors Chip and Dan Heath goes in depth with theory, empirical data and real life examples pertaining to the ingenious of ideas in the marketing world. They also discuss six elements that will aid in the success of any idea: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. If you are searching for the how-to of creating powerful marketing messages so to attract online viewers, this book serves as a solid foundation.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

In comparison to outbound marketing, which involves flooding the web with advertising ploys, inbound marketing focuses on actions of potential viewers. Learn more about how to promote your website and blog, while expanding the power of your social media community on sites including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Additionally, you’ll find tips on boosting the search rankings of your website thanks to increased traffic. You’ll also learn how to set and measure achievement of goals for your web activity that are in line with your reasons and goals for attracting an online audience.

If you’ve ever stared blankly at your site analytics and wondered if anything you’re doing actually has a point, you’re not alone. Most people stumble into inbound marketing thinking it’s just about better SEO or throwing up daily tweets, but there’s a layer of strategy that’s surprisingly detailed. Books like these really drill down into what’s actually working and get past all the surface-level “just post more!” advice you see floating around. Focusing on quality over quantity seems cliché, but when you actually put it to work, the difference can be unexpectedly dramatic. Not saying everyone will notice instantly, but the ripple effect is real.

Marketing, especially online, changes so fast that advice from a few years ago can feel outdated next to what’s happening now in 2025. Even with the best tips from these classic books, you’ll probably need to adapt things almost on the fly. For example, LinkedIn content formats or Google’s search algorithms—blink and something’s shifted. But honestly, that unpredictability is part of what makes this whole space more interesting. If you approach it as an experiment, you’ll probably end up discovering what works for your own audience a lot faster than if you just copy and paste what someone did in 2018.

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook

If you are anti-Facebook, or afraid of social media in general, this book will enlighten you on the credibility of this online resource. Author Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media of New York City, Chicago and Boston, explores the reasons and ways to make yourself likeable online. In conjunction with inbound marketing, making yourself likeable encourages the chances that you will receive friend-of-friend-of-friend recommendations—a surefire way to spread the reach of your online audience base.

Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization

Return on investment (ROI) is a major aspect of any marketing plan. When dealing with Internet activity required to attract an online audience, it can seem like an impossibility to measure. After all, you can spend hours on social media efforts, only to wonder if your invested time is worth it. For example, you might spend hours just setting up a Facebook page for your business, only to discover that your intended audience is not receptive to this social media site. This book explores several ways to measure the reach of social media sites, such as how to measure using URL click thru’s or the increase in traffic post ad campaigns.

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Web analytics involves analyzing web site activity, which includes the number of page views and unique visitors, as well as pages most often visited, files most frequently downloaded and marketing ad banners clicked, according to PC Mag Encyclopedia. As the Analytics Evangelist for Google, author Avinash Kaushik knows the ins and outs and what have you of the web analytics world. This book provides both a basic and in-depth understanding of how web activity is measured and how to interpret those statistics when developing and maintaining your website.