I'm building for an industry where there are maybe 2,000 buyers on Earth. Marketing advice doesn't apply
Almost every growth playbook assumes you have a large addressable audience and your problem is reach. Mine is the opposite. The total number of people who could ever buy what I'm building is small enough that I could probably list most of them on a spreadsheet in a week.
That changes everything:
Content marketing is nearly pointless as a top of funnel. There's no volume to convert.
SEO is a two year play for maybe forty relevant searches a month.
Community building is impossible, because these people don't hang out anywhere public. They're at conferences and on the phone.
What seems to actually work is being findable by name, having one artifact that proves competence, and then going directly at named individuals one at a time.
If you've sold into a small, high value B2B market — how did you get your first ten conversations? I don't think the standard advice applies here and I'd rather learn from someone who's done it than guess.
I wonder if the role of content changes rather than disappears.
In a market that small, content probably isn't there to create awareness at scale. It's there for the moment someone already knows your name and asks, "Can I trust this person?"
At that point, one thoughtful article or case study can be far more valuable than a hundred SEO-driven posts, because its job isn't to generate the conversation, it's to strengthen it.
You're right, and that shift in how I think about content is the useful part. In a market this small, content isn't top of funnel, it's bottom of funnel. It's the artifact someone reads after they already know my name, when the only question left is can I trust this person. One rigorous case study that proves I actually understand the problem does more than a hundred SEO posts ever could, because its job isn't to start the conversation, it's to close it. Adjusting content as trust infrastructure rather than reach. Apreciate this!