When it comes to creating a niche marketing strategy for B2Bs, there are no off-the-shelf options. It’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you can adapt the way you sell to match how customers like to buy. But doing that involves anticipating how they'll want to buy before they're actually buying that way because it takes time to get systems in place that can deliver on their ease-of-use expectations. This is particularly at a time when B2C giants like Goole, Amazon and Apple are setting the user experience bar lower than ever, shortening B2B buyers patience thresholds for a cumbersome UX. Plus, with a finite B2B market, you can’t afford to invest what B2Cs can. The market doesn't justify it. But you can't afford to make mistakes that alienate people either. So it's tough.  The evolution of B2B marketing to niche markets is something Adam Taylor, President of APM Music has been living and breathing for almost 2 decades.  And over the years, he’s experimented with different sales and marketing stacks. He spoke with me about what he’s learned from his experiences, walking me through his migration from analog to digital. It's an impressive case study of what it takes to lead a digital transformation. In this post -- written from the audio podcast interview at the top of this page (you can subscribe and listen here) -- Adam discusses how digital changed the music industry as a whole, and why there’s never a shortage of business opportunities, even in emerging or niche industries. How APM used technology to fulfill customer demand Getting digital transformations right takes time.  And the B2B lead generation strategies that accompany those changes take longer to come to fruition.  For APM, it started with first creating tech that helped customers find and download production music for use in film and television. Then, it moved into translating the value of that technology to their customers, who at the time were used to audio CDs.  It was crazy. Because the B2B customer journey was migrating from analog to digital, so they had to help their customers through that transition.  Now, they have the adoption to couple technology and data analytics to continuously improve the customer experience, so it becomes more personalized. The transformation from a brick-and-mortar music library to a digital one took around six years. “Technology was a great way to serve our customers with a digital library. At first, that WAS the selling proposition.” Bringing together the tech and B2B marketing message Everything about the supply chain of music, from discoverability and production to delivery, has changed. But APM has solidified their place in the market with a niche marketing strategy that uses technology to keep the customer’s needs at the forefront of everything they do. “Our obligation is to bring in great music and deliver what our clients want when they want it. In between that is the search engine. But marketing is also very important because we need to understand our client and their wants.” Here were the major challenges and digital transformations in their B2B growth marketing approach: Having sales and marketing work together to create a specific set of goals around customer acquisition that helps marketing bring better MQLs to sales.Using data to personalize the results customers see wh...