Best Dental Marketing Speakers for 2026: 7 Worth Booking

Every "best dental speakers" article I've read does the same annoying thing.

It refuses to name anyone.

You get 1,200 words about how the right speaker "aligns with your audience objectives," and then a contact form. That's not a list. That's a lead magnet wearing a list costume.

So here are actual names. Seven people who speak on dental marketing, what each one is genuinely good at, and the room each one fits.

Two things before the list.

This isn't ranked. Ranking a social media expert against a full-arch closing specialist is meaningless — they're solving different problems for different rooms. It's sorted by lane.

And I'm on it. This is my website, so weigh my own entry accordingly. I put myself at the bottom and I'd rather tell you that up front than have you notice it and discount the whole page.

How I picked these seven

Three filters:

• They actively work in the thing they talk about. No one on this list is a full-time professional speaker who read about dental marketing. They all run agencies or practices and speak on the side.
• They have a real stage history, not a speaker page with stock photos. Every person here has spoken at named national or state meetings you can verify.
• They own a lane. Someone who speaks on "dental marketing" broadly is usually worse than someone who speaks on one piece of it very well.

Grace Rizza — ethical marketing and startup practices

Founder and CEO of Identity Dental Marketing, which she started in 2009 after a stint as a practice marketing director. She served on the ADA's 2016 Dental Marketing Expert Panel, was a 2019 Influential Women in Business honoree, and hosts the Dentistry's Growing with Grace podcast.

Her stage history is heavier on state and local than on the national majors: the South Carolina Dental Association annual session, Chicago Dental Society branch meetings, the Baltimore County Dental Association, the Hellenic American Dental Society, and LSU School of Dentistry. That's worth knowing rather than glossing — it means she's spent a lot of time in smaller rooms with actual practice owners, which is a different skill than working a 3,000-seat hall.

Book her for: rooms full of practice owners who feel like they've been sold to badly. Her whole angle is marketing ethics and doing it without the sleaze, which lands especially well with startup and early-growth practices.

Rita Zamora — social media and online reputation

Zamora has the deepest big-meeting résumé on this list. She's a returning speaker at the ADA Annual Session, the Hinman Dental Meeting, the Chicago Midwinter Meeting, and the AAOMS Annual Meeting, and she served as contributing marketing faculty for the ADA's Center for Success Certificate Program. She wrote Get Found, Get Liked, Get Patients on social media for dentistry, and she's been working in this corner of the industry since 2007.

She's also been shifting toward AI visibility alongside the social and reputation work, which is the right read on where patient discovery is going.

Book her for: specialty audiences. That oral-surgery and association-meeting history isn't an accident — she knows how to pitch social and reputation content to a specialist room without it feeling like a general-dentistry talk with the words swapped.

Xaña Winans — branding and full-funnel marketing

CEO and founder of Golden Proportions Marketing, which she started in 2001, a genuine 25-year run in dental marketing. She holds the marketing seat on the board of the Academy of Dental Management Consultants and has a Fellowship in the International Academy of Dental Facial Esthetics.

She lectures on a steady circuit of national meetings, state meetings, and study clubs, and her sessions lean hard on actionable steps rather than theory. The goal is putting doctors and teams in control of their own marketing outcomes instead of outsourcing the understanding.

Book her for: brand and positioning sessions, and for teams, not just doctors. Her material works when the office manager and the front desk are in the room too.

Bart Knellinger — case acceptance and closing

President and CEO of Progressive Dental. His lane is narrow and lucrative: getting practices to close high-value cases, especially full-arch implants.

He founded The Closing Institute, an accredited CE curriculum for training treatment coordinators to close big cases, and he keynotes its two-day Boot Camp. He also runs Catalyst, Progressive Dental's symposium on increasing full-arch implant case volume.

Book him for: implant-focused and high-ticket clinical audiences. If your room is doing full-arch, he's the most directly relevant person on this list. If your room is general dentistry doing bread-and-butter restorative, he's a mismatch.

Justin Morgan — dental SEO

Known industry-wide as "The Dental Marketing Guy," Morgan is the closest thing dentistry has to a dedicated SEO specialist speaker. He built his reputation by ranking his own site for the terms he sells against, which is at least honest proof-of-work in a category full of people who can't.

He's a fixture on the dental podcast circuit: Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, the Raving Patients Podcast, and plenty more. He consistently gives away real tactics instead of teasing a consult.

Book him for: technical, tactical SEO sessions. Best for audiences that already understand marketing basics and want depth, not a 101.

Naren Arulrajah — marketing systems and process

Founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, serving dental and medical practices. He won AceTech Ontario's 2014 Leadership Initiative Award and is a member of the Academy of Dental Management Consultants. He's built the Ekwa Growth Club and Ekwa Institute and hosts a podcast for dental professionals.

Book him for: the systems-and-process angle: how a practice should structure marketing operations and hold a vendor accountable, rather than any single channel tactic.

Pete Johnson — AI search visibility

That's me. Disclosure again: my site, my list, appropriate side-eye warranted.

I co-founded Lasso MD, where I'm VP of Sales & Strategy, and I've analyzed more than 1,500 dental practices over the last 12 years. Before Lasso I was in sales leadership at ProSites and WEO Media, two of the largest dental marketing agencies in the country, so I've seen this industry's sales tactics from the inside — which informs a lot of what I say on stage about vendor accountability.

My signature session is "Mastering AI Search Visibility," on how practices get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. I've spoken at the IDIA Hawaii Symposium, the Rocky Mountain Dental Convention, and Smile Together Las Vegas.

Book me for: rooms that need the AI search conversation. It's the fastest-moving topic in dental marketing right now and most rooms are two years behind it. More on why AI search is the hottest dental speaking topic in 2026, or the speaking page if you want the logistics.

Adjacent names worth knowing

Not marketing speakers, but they come up constantly when organizers are building 2026 agendas:

• Brian Colao, director of Dykema's Dental Service Organizations Industry Group, is the definitive voice on DSO legal and regulatory questions. The 13th annual Dykema DSO Conference runs July 15–17, 2026 at the Gaylord Rockies in Denver.
• Meridith Elliott Powell is keynoting the AADOM Annual Conference, September 3–5, 2026 in Orlando. General business and sales rather than dental-specific, which is often exactly right for an office manager audience.

How to actually pick from this list

The names matter less than the match. A great speaker in front of the wrong room still bombs.

Before you book anyone, answer this: who is actually sitting in the seats? Owners, office managers, associates, group practice leaders, and implant-focused clinicians all want different things, and most bad speaker decisions come from skipping that question.

Then check three things:

1. Current experience, not just speaking experience. Topics are moving fast enough now that material from eighteen months ago is visibly stale. Audiences clock it immediately.
2. Specificity. "Five ways to grow your practice" is a red flag. "Here's what changed in search behavior this quarter, across this many practices" is the bar.
3. A relationship to the material beyond content marketing. The speakers worth booking built something, sold something, or broke something enough times that their take has edges.

What disqualifies a speaker, in my experience: a canned deck, no audience customization, and a stage pitch dressed up as education. Organizers are usually too polite about how disappointing that floor is.

If you want the longer screening process, I wrote it up in how to choose a dental marketing speaker and the seven questions every organizer should ask before booking. For pairing the right person to the right subject, see dental speaker topics that actually fill rooms in 2026 and what dental audiences actually want from a speaker.

The short version

Seven names, seven lanes: Rizza on ethical marketing, Zamora on social and reputation, Winans on brand, Knellinger on case acceptance, Morgan on SEO, Arulrajah on systems, me on AI search.

Pick the lane your room actually needs. Then pick the person.

The slickest speaker page is not the signal. What people do differently on Monday is.

Sources

Every credential and date below was checked against a primary source in August 2026. Where I couldn't verify a claim, I cut it rather than round it up.

• Grace Rizza speaking history and bio: Identity Dental Marketing founding year, ADA 2016 Dental Marketing Expert Panel, meeting list.
• Rita Zamora bio and DentistryIQ profile: meeting history, ADA Center for Success faculty role, book.
• Xaña Winans, ADMC and DentistryIQ profile: ADMC board seat, IADFE Fellowship, agency founding year.
• Bart Knellinger, Progressive Dental and The Closing Institute: role, Closing Institute, Catalyst symposium.
• Naren Arulrajah, ADMC and 2014 Leadership Initiative Award: Ekwa Marketing, AceTech Ontario award.
• Dykema DSO Conference: 13th annual, July 15–17, 2026, Gaylord Rockies.
• AADOM 2026 Annual Conference: September 3–5, 2026, Orlando, and the keynote.