The Buyer’s Journey for Psychologists and Coaches

The advantage of the conversion-funnel framework called “The Buyer’s Journey” is in one simple idea: strictly speaking, it isn’t a funnel model.
It’s a set of psycho-logical checkpoints in the customer’s decision to buy.
Both psycho and logical.

After gathering a group of psychologists and coaches (in the Russian market, “coach” often means a life/business coach, not a sports coach), we ended up building this model, and I tried to describe it very briefly for their homework and for building a media plan for each of them (a channel/content/ads plan).

Awareness Stage — Awareness (of the problem): how does the audience search for a solution when they don’t know the term that names the problem?
Consideration Stage — Consideration (of options): how does the audience search when the term is already known?
Decision Stage — Decision (who to buy from): how does the audience decide who deserves their trust?

And here’s what I noticed: technically, from niche to niche, touchpoints and touchpoint “places” don’t change that much: a blog, a website, paid traffic, SEO, email, automated funnels & etc.

The stage descriptions, though, can change dramatically.
For example, in dentistry, the Awareness Stage often happens in childhood: mum and dad teach you to brush your teeth and explain why. In that niche, the fight for leads is concentrated around Decision Stage: the lead goes to the one who earns more trust. The legal requirements for dentists’ websites in the Russian Federation (in Russia, medical service websites have strict disclosure and compliance requirements) support that exact task.

Consideration in dentistry, when it exists, tends to be weak. A cavity doesn’t get healed by “psychosomatic” placebo effects or homeopathy. A cavity needs a filling, and a filling doesn’t appear from a dilution of 1 millilitre in 20 litres of distilled water.

This repeats across many niches built on something people have known forever. Real estate is a good example: awareness that you need somewhere to live arrives naturally, at the moment you understand what it means when a walk ends and your mum takes you “home”.

So what about the psychology niche?

Here, The Buyer’s Journey starts to resemble the well-known “five stages of accepting the inevitable”.
When we build 4–5 (sometimes 6) media plans in the current DST format (DST = Digital Science Team; our growth marketing team), for psychology as a niche, we keep seeing the same pattern across very different cases: people don’t go to a psychologist until pain crosses some conditional “rock-bottom” threshold.

So Awareness starts from acceptance: the term can already exist, and the harder part is admitting it applies to you.

The task of a psychologist, psychotherapist, coach, or any other pomogator (Russian slang: “helper”; a practitioner who helps) is to create materials that help a person acknowledge the problem, and that sketch a bleak future that grows out of denial.

For example, I once saw an article on VOS magazine (VOS is a Russian online magazine) titled “Alcoholism: Myth or Reality”. Looking back, I see it as a piece that can help someone recognise the problem.

It has a paragraph like this:

“If you got drunk on Friday and you’re proud you lasted until the next Friday — that’s it. If it’s the third time this week you find yourself having a bottle of red wine with dinner — that’s it. If you can’t imagine meeting a friend without three glasses of white — that’s it. If you love to drink alone before sleep — that’s it.”

Today, I can easily imagine that as a checklist. Yet in that form, it isn’t an interactive “FIND OUT you have alcoholism, download a PDF, tick boxes”. In that form, it’s an overview article: it’s more about the problem as a cultural phenomenon, and between the lines you recognise someone you know. You might recognise yourself too, if you have enough will.
The call to “check yourself” can be rejected precisely because, deep down, the person already knows. They don’t need information. They need courage, validation, support, or a mirror they won’t be able to ignore.

So the Awareness stage, in a forced form, looks like social advertising.
In a non-forced form, it looks like a phenomenological essay.

As for Consideration, it’s closer to “bargaining”: read a book, cope alone, cope with friends, buy a course, or go to individual or group therapy.

Here everything depends on how the pomogator’s service matrix is designed (the set of formats: 1:1, group, course, community, diagnostics, etc.). If you map the real ways a person can solve their problem, you get a direct prompt for developing your own variety, so a potential client can see that the options live here. Then one question remains: do I trust this pomogator, or someone else? Does something about them push me away?

If there’s only a 1:1 session, this stage becomes a targeting problem: focus on the people who need exactly that form of solution.
Every niche has overserved and underserved customers. Someone happily pays for a premium taxi. Someone finds a free ride by sharing the trip with strangers.
Same logic here: if you try to pull the blanket towards 1:1 consultations as “the optimal and only right solution”, while the real reason is that you simply have nothing else in your service matrix, it reads as fake, and sales suffer.

Decision, in turn, includes diplomas, titles, experience, and supervision hours. It also includes the problem set the pomogator works with, their personal motivation, and whether there’s comfort, match, and vibe (in services, people want to see a practitioner who’s genuinely engaged with their craft). That’s why the market moved towards introductory/diagnostic sessions. That’s also why many people finally understood what media content is for: short clips, videos, live streams, podcasts.

The devil is, as always, in the small things — in how you build each stage and make it work through the same HADI cycle (HADI = Hypothesis–Action–Data–Insight iterative testing). For now, the BASE looks like this:

Awareness Stage — help them acknowledge.
Consideration Stage — focus on the people your current solution options fit.
Decision Stage — show yourself from multiple angles and invite them to try.