Your Experience Is the Algorithm Now

I reviewed a video, & AI helped me write this article. Is that clear? I'm in a rush for a reason!

I stumbled into a marketing podcast today expecting to skim it for a couple of minutes and close the tab. Thirty minutes later, I was still there, nodding like one of those bobblehead dogs people used to put on their dashboard.

The host, Brad Sugars, was making a point I’ve been circling for years but never quite landed the way he did: if your marketing still looks like it did five years ago, you’re not standing still.

Click to watch the video.

You’re disappearing.

Slowly, politely, one algorithm update at a time.

That got my attention, because a lot of the encore professionals I work with think “marketing” is something they can bolt on later, after they’ve figured out the offer.

(Yes, you really should perfect your offer first!)

I get why. You spent thirty to forty years being excellent at your actual job.

Nobody taught you to think like a content strategist, and frankly, why would they?

You were busy running a division, closing deals, or keeping a hospital floor from catching fire.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: the rules changed while you weren’t looking, and they changed in your favor if you know what to do with it.

Buyers Don’t Want a Salesperson. They Want Confirmation.

Here’s the old model. Marketing’s job was to get someone’s name and number so a salesperson could take over, explain everything, and walk them to the finish line.

That job doesn’t exist anymore. By the time someone reaches out to you today, they’ve already read the articles, watched the videos, and compared their options.

They’re not showing up to learn. They’re showing up to confirm they picked right.

(Hint: nailing your offer allows you to create the content that does that for you.)

Which means the actual selling, the thing that used to happen in a conference room or a discovery call, now happens through your content, weeks or months before anyone gets you on the phone.

If that content doesn’t exist, or worse, if it exists but doesn’t sound like you, you’ve lost the sale before you ever knew there was a prospect.

Google Isn’t the Finish Line Anymore. AI Is.

For twenty years, “get found online” meant “rank on Google.”

Fine.

Simple enough.

Now people are asking ChatGPT and Claude who the best consultant is for their exact problem, and those tools are answering with whoever has an actual footprint… real articles, real credentials, a body of work that adds up to something recognizable.

If that’s not you, you’re not losing to a competitor. You’re losing to invisibility.

And invisibility doesn’t care how good you are at the actual work.

The flip side is the part I want you to sit with and truly think about a few times a day: this system rewards depth and history, not follower counts and dance trends.

A forty-year-old with 200,000 TikTok followers and no real body of work is not better positioned here than you are.

You have decades of judgment sitting in your head. That’s the raw material. You just haven’t turned it into anything an algorithm, or a human, can find. (YET!)

Content Is an Asset, Not an Errand

This is the part that should genuinely excite you.

A paid ad is rented attention; the second you stop paying, it stops working. I know, because I’ve sold and coached for ad agencies and their clients for the last 15 years.

A solid article or a well-made video, on the other hand, just sits there repetitively doing its job for years.

It answers a stranger’s question at 11 pm on a Tuesday without you lifting a finger.

That’s not a marketing tactic.

That’s an asset.

It compounds.

And unlike most assets, you don’t need capital to build it.

You need the thing you already have too much of: hard-won experience nobody had to Google.

The catch is consistency, not intensity.

One brilliant article a year does very little.

A steady, unglamorous drip of useful thinking- that’s what builds the kind of trust an AI model (or a skeptical prospect) eventually stops arguing with.

Short Videos Get the Date. Long Content Gets the Marriage.

There’s a lazy debate going around about whether short-form or long-form content is “better.” Wrong question. They do different jobs.

Short clips are the handshake; they get you noticed in a crowded feed.

Long-form work- the real articles, the deeper breakdowns, the case studies is where someone actually decides to trust you. One earns attention. The other earns a client.

You don’t need to become a TikTok personality at 58. You need one or two channels where your depth can actually show up, instead of getting sanded down into fifteen seconds of nothing.

People Trust People. Not Logos, Not Taglines.

The last piece is the one that should feel like relief instead of pressure: buyers trust a real person faster than they trust a polished company page. Your name, your actual opinions, your specific way of explaining things — that’s worth more than a generic “About Us” paragraph ever will be.

You spent a career building judgment other people paid for. The new game isn’t about learning to perform online. It’s about letting that judgment be visible somewhere.

Two Questions Worth Asking Yourself This Week

1. If someone searched for exactly what you help with, would they find you — or your competitor?

2. If they did find you, is there enough real, substantive content there to trust you before you ever say a word?

If the honest answer to either one is “not really,” you’re not behind. You’re just early to fixing it, which is a much better place to be.

---

If this is the kind of thing you want to actually build, not just think about, that’s a big part of what we work through together over at Encore Society. Come hang out with people doing the same thing.