The Mortgage Marketer 2026: What Happens When Mortgage Marketers Find Their People

I closed out The Mortgage Marketer Friday afternoon with something I hadn't planned to say out loud.

So I'll say it here too: I was terrified to put on this conference.

I had a hunch that mortgage marketers needed a community of their own.

My gut is usually right about stuff like this. But self-doubt is a real blocker for me, more often than I'd like to admit, and this was a big gamble.

A really nice resort, a full block of rooms – we even got a DJ. All the things that turn into a painful check if nobody shows up.

We did it anyway, because we believed it needed to happen.

The mortgage industry is changing faster than it ever has, and we need better marketers in this space. Not just more tools – better marketers.

And better marketers come from being around other good marketers.

So when the first registrations came in, every single one felt like a win.

Not for the budget. For the idea.

Then Wednesday night happened.

50 marketers from 40 companies were standing on a patio in Laguna Beach, and the vision I'd been nervous about for a year was just...real.

Happening right in front of me.

I'm not going to pretend that wasn't a little emotional. But here's what I learned from this experience.

Jump to: 

Why Mortgage Marketers Needed Their Own Room | What Happens When Competitors Share Playbooks | What Actually Worked | The Proximity Effect | What’s Next for 2027 

Why Mortgage Marketers Needed a Conference of Their Own

Mortgage marketing is one of the hardest jobs in marketing.

You're not just running one brand, you're running a hundred loan officer brands at once.

Every post is a regulated communication. Sales needs leads. Leadership wants ROI. Compliance needs guardrails. And half the company still thinks your job is making flyers.

Here's the part that has always bugged me:

The people doing this job haven't really had a room of their own.

Most mortgage conferences are built primarily for loan officers, sales leaders, or executives. Marketers get the vendor hall.

You can't fix that with a webinar. (Especially when most of the people on your webinar have it running in a background tab. You know it, I know it.)

Webinars can deliver information. But the conversations that actually change how you do your job happen when you're sitting next to somebody who has the same problems and says, "Oh yeah, we dealt with that last year. Here's what worked."

That's why we built The Mortgage Marketer.

To give mortgage marketing leaders a place to connect, learn, build things, and get better because they're surrounded by people who understand the work.

That's it.

Not a SocialCoach user conference with a costume on. A real mortgage marketing community.

SocialCoach is proud to be the one who set the table.

What Happened When Competing Mortgage Marketers Got in the Same Room

I lost count of how many times someone said some version of: "I thought we were competitors."

And technically, a lot of people in that room were.

Guild. Rate. PRMG. American Pacific. The Money Store. BankSouth. Atlantic Bay. First Commonwealth.

These are companies competing for the same loan officers, referral partners, and borrowers.

But take away the sales pitch and put the marketers behind those companies at the same table, and something interesting happens. The competitive walls come down pretty quickly.

Nobody planned that. It just happens when you put people with the same hard job in the same room and take away the sales pitch.

People started comparing notes. Sharing workflows. Talking about what had failed. Showing each other what was actually working. Someone would bring up a problem and inevitably another person at the table would say, "Oh, we had that exact problem last year. Here's what we did."

It turns out the mortgage marketing community wants to exist. It just needed somewhere to meet.

We had a sign made for the welcome party that said: "You Found Your People."

I figured it was a nice touch.

I didn't expect it to become the most-quoted line of the entire conference.

But the more I watched the room, the more sense it made.

You could admit that something wasn't working without worrying that you were the only marketing team in mortgage that hadn't figured it out yet.

And it wasn't only the veteran marketing leaders getting value from that.

Molly Kaufman from Society Mortgage is a great example – a newer marketer, a one-woman shop, and Gen Z. She told me she'd never been in a room with people who do what she does.

Molly came in with a very different level of experience than some of the VPs sitting around her, but that ended up being part of what made the room work.

She asked more insightful questions than almost anyone there, and she gave as much as she got. 

Watching a room of experienced mortgage marketing VPs lean in while a first-year marketer explains how her generation actually consumes content?

One of my favorite moments of the conference. And honestly, the whole point.

Expertise doesn't always come from the person with the most senior title.

Sometimes you just need to get the right people close enough to learn from each other.

What The Lone Loan Officer Learned About Mortgage Marketing

There was another person in the room who gave me a completely different perspective.

Kaitlyn Tomlinson from First Commonwealth Bank was the only loan officer at the conference.

Tom Sullivan sent her as the company's representative, which meant she spent two days sitting inside conversations that normally happen entirely on the marketing side of the business.

She left with a completely different picture of what marketing does on behalf of loan officers every day. And she went home wanting a better relationship between sales and marketing.

Her word for the two days was "a reset."

I loved that because we talk endlessly about sales and marketing alignment in this industry. Usually somebody wants another meeting, another dashboard, or another process.

Maybe some of the problem is simpler than that.

Marketing doesn't always understand what it's like to be an LO trying to close loans, maintain Realtor relationships, answer borrowers, and still somehow find time to make a video.

And loan officers definitely don't always know enough to appreciate the 300 steps happening behind the scenes to get that "simple" campaign out the door.

Kaitlyn got to see it.

If every lender sent one LO to sit with their marketing team for two days, I think half the sales-versus-marketing friction in this industry would disappear.

What Attendees Said About The Mortgage Marketer 2026

I could keep telling you what I thought the room felt like, but the people who attended said it better.

"The sign said 'you found your people,' and boy was it right. Industry conferences are wonderful, but having one dedicated to the marketers behind the mortgage world was a feeling I can't describe... Same time next year?"

- Sara Rodgers, Brand Social Manager, Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group

"I left with more ideas than I've had in the past six months, and honestly, that wasn't even the biggest takeaway. The bigger one was simpler. This industry is so much stronger when we build each other up instead of going it alone."

- Erica Goodwin, Marketing Executive, First Heritage Mortgage

"I loved that they weren't just presentations. We actually built things. I left with an AI skill and workflow I can continue building on, a rollout plan I can bring back to our team, and new recruiting content and ideas that I'm genuinely excited to put into action."

- Molly Kaufman, Growth Marketing & Brand Strategist, Society Mortgage

"Laguna Beach was more than a conference. It was a reset, a creative spark, and a look at where our industry is headed...I can't wait to bring these ideas back to our team and find new ways to better serve our customers."

- Kaitlyn Tomlinson, Loan Officer, First Commonwealth

The Mortgage Marketing Sessions People Couldn't Stop Talking About

The community was the part I was most nervous about because you can't really put that on an agenda and force it to happen.

The sessions, though, we could control. And a few formats worked so well that we're absolutely doing them again.

The Roundtables

We did two roundtable sessions with 11 topics and eight seats per table.

Instead of listening to another person on a stage, attendees picked the problem they actually wanted to talk about and sat down with other people trying to solve it too.

People didn't want to stop.

Several attendees told me the roundtables were the most valuable part of the whole event, and I believe them.

There was no small talk and very little theory. People were swapping actual playbooks.

The Workshops

The same thing happened in the workshops.

Drew Gillett, Brandon Durham, and Jelaire Grillo didn't just stand up and present. They made people build.

Molly put it best afterward: "We actually built things."

She went home with an AI workflow, a rollout plan, and recruiting content she was genuinely excited to use.

That's what I wanted from this conference. I don't want you to fly to Laguna Beach, fill a notebook with good ideas, put it on your desk Monday morning, and never open it again.

I want you to leave with something you can and will actually use.

The Compliance Session

Jill Johnson was the lone compliance voice in a room full of marketers, and she brought the most creative slide deck of the conference.

More importantly, she got people thinking differently about the relationship between marketing and compliance. The conversation wasn't about how marketing gets around compliance. It was about how you build systems both sides can actually say yes to.

When compliance is the session people are still talking about at dinner, something went right.

The Opener

I opened the conference by showing everyone my very first SocialCoach video and some of our cringey 2019 posts.

Raw stuff.

People laughed, which was the goal.

Because looking back at how bad we all were is the best way to see how far we've come.

Social media changed. Video changed. AI is changing everything again. The job of a mortgage marketer looks very different than it did seven years ago.

We're all still figuring parts of it out.

Which made it a lot easier for everyone else in the room to be honest about what they were figuring out too.

Why Some of the Best Conference Moments Weren't on the Agenda

As good as the sessions were, some of my favorite moments had nothing to do with the agenda.

I live in Orange County and love showing people around, so each morning before the coffee was even out, a different group met up and we went exploring.

Thursday we walked through some of the most beautiful coves in Laguna. The next morning we drove a few miles down PCH and hiked the Aliso Peak Trail.

I told everyone it was "easy." (It was not easy.)

Sorry about that.

At the top, I introduced the group to one of my new favorite Instagram and TikTok trends, Korean slow jogging. We did it right there on the trail, filmed it, and the video got a bunch of great engagement.

Gotta always be creating.

But the video isn't really the point.

What I remember is a group of people who'd known each other for about 36 hours standing on a trail at sunrise, doing nothing work-related, laughing at a CEO who lied about the hike.

That's the informal, human stuff you cannot manufacture on a Zoom call.

And weirdly, it's the same thing we keep telling loan officers about marketing. People connect with people.

You can have all the right information and all the right tools, but relationships get a lot easier once people actually know and like each other.

What SocialCoach Launched at The Mortgage Marketer 2026

That idea of making things more human actually carried into a lot of what we talked about on stage too.

I said this wasn't a SocialCoach conference in a costume, and it wasn't. But we did pick Laguna to launch something because if you're going to show marketers a new product, show it to the people who'll actually have to run it.

Reputation Management for Mortgage Companies

Reputation Management is live.

This is the piece that completes the flywheel we've been building for seven years.

Social gets your loan officers seen. Video gets them trusted. Reviews help them get chosen.

Mortgage companies can request reviews, including by video, manage them across Google, Facebook, and Zillow, respond with AI assistance, and put those reviews to work across individual loan officer pages.

Reviews are one of the last things a borrower looks at before picking up the phone, and they're becoming more important as people use both traditional search and AI tools to decide who they trust.

Jordan Wild walked the room through how to build a review campaign borrowers will actually respond to, and people started building their own right there in the session.

That's how I like to introduce a product. Don't just show people what it does. Let them figure out how they're going to use it.

Personalized Loan Officer Video Throughout the Mortgage Process

Super Pages got its moment too.

Most people knew we did social. Fewer knew we could take one loan officer's video and put it into milestone communication throughout the loan process automatically.

So a first-time homebuyer can see their actual loan officer at pre-approval, clear to close, funding, or wherever else that lender decides a human explanation would help.

Eric Lescarbeau showed how a social post turns into a Video Page, which turns into a conversation. I watched people who'd used SocialCoach for years realize the loan process itself was the part they'd been leaving on the table.

The line I heard over and over was:

"I knew some of this existed, but I didn't realize how awesome it really was."

At first, I took that as a product compliment.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something else going on.

Want to see how SocialCoach helps mortgage marketing teams scale social media, video, compliance, and adoption across hundreds of loan officers? See SocialCoach in action.

The Proximity Effect: Why Mortgage Technology Adoption Really Happens

These weren't people who had never heard of the features we were showing.

In some cases, they'd seen the emails. They'd been on the webinars. They had access already.

What changed in Laguna was that they saw another marketer talk about how they were actually using something. They could ask questions. Then they could walk over to our team and see it for themselves. In the workshops, they could start building their own version while the idea was still fresh.

That's a very different experience from getting an announcement email and a link to a training recording.

I've been thinking about that since we got home, and I've started calling it The Proximity Effect.

Because this is almost the exact opposite of how most enterprise technology gets rolled out.

A lender buys a platform, marketing announces it on a Tuesday webinar, everybody gets a login, and maybe there's a training recording somewhere.

Six months later, adoption is 30% and leadership wants to know what went wrong.

Usually the answer is that we need more training.

I'm not sure that's always true.

Most loan officers don't need another 45-minute webinar explaining where the buttons are. They need to see somebody they respect using the thing and getting a result they want.

They need to be able to ask that person, How are you actually doing this? Is it worth it? What happened when you tried it?

And then, while they're interested, you need to make it easy for them to try.

That's what Jelaire Grillo's Adoption Framework session was really about, and it's why people left with a rollout plan instead of another notebook full of ideas.

Information travels just fine over the internet. Conviction is harder.

So if you're a mortgage marketing leader trying to get 500 loan officers to adopt something, I'd try this before scheduling your fourth training webinar.

Find the people already doing it well. Let everybody else hear directly from them. Show exactly what they're doing. Then make the first step so easy that people can copy it before the excitement wears off.

That's what happened naturally in Laguna.

And I think there's a pretty big lesson in that for how we roll out almost anything inside a mortgage company.

What The Mortgage Marketer Taught Me About Community

The Proximity Effect wasn't something I went to Laguna planning to write about.

Neither was most of this, honestly.

I went into the week hoping people would learn a lot. They did. But that's not what they keep talking about.

They keep talking about the people.

The group texts are still going. People are sharing each other's posts. They're following up on conversations that started at the roundtables. They're sending each other things they think will help.

Which brings me back to that sign.

"You Found Your People."

I underestimated how much people doing a really specific, really hard job needed to be around other people who understood it without needing an explanation first.

Nobody had to explain why compliance matters, or why a "quick social post" somehow needs six approvals.

Everybody already knew.

So instead of spending half the conversation explaining the problem, they could get straight to helping each other solve it.

That's the community I hoped we'd build. I just didn't know we'd feel it that quickly.

The Mortgage Marketer 2027

Sara Rodgers ended her post with:"Same time next year?"

Yes. We're doing it again.

The group texts are still going, the Instagram posts are still coming, and this crew has been talking about Laguna loudly enough that we're already going to need more room.

Location and dates are TBD, and we want your input on both.

If you were there, tell us what to keep and what to change.

If you weren't, stay tuned. Over the next few weeks we'll be sharing the sessions and biggest takeaways from each one right here.

One last thing.

I'm grateful to every person who got on a plane for this. All boats rise with the tide, and every one of you brought a perspective that made the whole thing better.

Not some of you. Every one of you added something.

The mortgage marketing community exists now.

Come find your people.

Want to see how SocialCoach helps mortgage marketing teams scale social media, video, compliance, and adoption across hundreds of loan officers? See SocialCoach in action.

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