Mentoring the Different Phases of the Buyer Journey

The tricky thing is that your prospects are at different awareness levels.

It’s time to start attracting your profitable audience. But we still have a few things to consider before creating content, copy, and an offer. 

Let’s quickly revisit the mentor marketing approach. It contains a few key concepts that are crucial to the Personal Enterprise Growth Framework. 

Imagine once again that you’re a mentor in a one-on-one situation. What does that person seek from your training or counseling?

Advice, right? No one wants just raw information. They want meaningful guidance and solutions, initially in the form of actionable advice. 

As a mentor, you deliver that advice in the context of your hard-earned experience. Plus, you send over relevant news, trends, and “how-to” content that strategically moves your mentee in the right direction. 

But you also understand what level that person is at with respect to the advice, right? At any given time, people at various stages of their careers or businesses need different input from you. 

And that’s precisely what you do with mentor marketing. But instead of one-on-one, you perform this role as the leader of an audience (and eventually a community) that needs your insight, guidance, and support to attain their version of success.

This is done with content, true. But what you’re really doing is telling a story that people need to hear to achieve their goals and dreams. 

As you already know, you need to tell a Star Wars story (or The Wizard of Oz, or The Matrix, if you prefer). And by that, I mean you need to take your prospects along on a marketing version of the mythic hero’s journey. 

To review, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell identifies a “monomyth” — a fundamental structure common to stories that have survived for thousands of years. Campbell’s identification of these enduring tales from different historical eras and regions of the world has inspired modern storytellers to consciously craft their work following the monomyth framework, commonly known as the hero’s journey. 

So the prospect is the protagonist, which means the hero. They don’t necessarily feel like a hero at the moment, but they’re going on a buying journey with you to solve a problem and, in the process,  experience some form of transformation. 

You show up and take your prospects on a digital version of the hero’s journey, treating them as the main character of their own story — just as they already do in their own minds. You’re the mentor who makes success happen for them with information and products or services. 

Thinking this way makes you a better entrepreneur and marketer. Instead of focusing on yourself and your desire to sell stuff, you become the mentor that helps others get what they want — leading you to get what you want. 

What Does Your Prospect Already Know? 

The tricky thing is that your prospects are at different awareness levels, depending on how long they’ve been considering solutions to their problem and how much exposure you’ve provided to your offer. And unlike a one-on-one mentoring relationship, you must anticipate this with your content and copy.

That means the way you approach your offers will change depending on the stage in which your prospect happens to be. And in line with our “upside-down” approach to audience and business building, you’ll need to go in the opposite direction of what most people are doing online.