Dental Practice Marketing in 2026: The Barrier Is Price, Not Reach

Dental practice marketing in Australia often fixes the wrong problem. Most of your future patients already know you exist. What stops them is the price. In the ABS Patient Experiences survey for 2024-25, 25.2% of people who needed a dentist put off the visit or skipped it. Cost was the reason for 16.1%. All other reasons together came to 9.1%. For GPs it flips: 26.6% delayed, but cost explained only 7.7%. So your most useful move is clear prices on your site. Then people do not have to ring and ask.

What actually stops Australians booking a dental appointment?

Money stops them. Awareness, location and the wait matter far less.

The ABS Patient Experiences survey for 2024-25, released 18 November 2025, asks people who needed health care if they put it off or went without. It also asks why. Dental care looks different from everything else on the list.

Of people who needed a dentist, 25.2% put it off or did not go. Cost was a reason for 16.1% of them. Other reasons came to 9.1%. These include no service nearby, being too busy and a long wait.

Now put a GP beside it. A similar share put it off, at 26.6%. But cost explained only 7.7%. Other reasons came to 18.9%. The pattern is almost exactly reversed.

Here is the same question across 4 services. It shows the share who said cost was a reason.

Cost stops more than twice as many dental patients as GP patients. That one fact should change where you put your marketing money.

The same release has 2 more figures worth keeping in mind. Women were more likely than men to put off dental care over cost. The figures were 18.0% against 13.7%. People in outer regional or remote areas were also more likely to delay over cost than people in big cities. Those figures were 19.6% against 14.9%. If your practice is regional, your patients face a bigger cost barrier than the national average.

Why does the standard dental marketing playbook miss this?

The usual playbook was built somewhere else. That market had different rules and a different way of paying.

Open any dental marketing guide and you will see the same list. Rank for "dentist near me". Run local ads. Post before-and-after photos. Collect five-star reviews. Build a referral programme. Almost all of it is about being seen by more people.

None of that is wrong, exactly. It is aimed at a patient who has never heard of you. The ABS numbers describe a different person. This person knows they need a dentist. They have decided not to go anyway. They do not know what it will cost, and they cannot face finding out.

More ads do nothing for that person. They already know about you. What they are missing is a price.

Also, you cannot even use 2 of those borrowed tactics here. Section 133 of the National Law is the rule behind health ads. It bans patient testimonials about clinical care in advertising. Before-and-after photos are tightly limited too. So Australian practices take the playbook and delete the 2 tactics that did the convincing. Then they run what is left. I make this point about health marketing in general in healthcare marketing advice borrowed from SaaS. Dentistry is the clearest example.

What does AHPRA let a dental practice say about price?

AHPRA, the body behind the health ad rules, lets you say more than you might think. It does set conditions, and most practices have never read them.

The “Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service” came out on 14 December 2020. They do not ban price ads. No rule says to keep your fees off your website. Instead, the guidelines set a standard for how you state a price. They also list the kinds of price ads that may break the National Law.

Here are some of the ads the guidelines flag as a possible breach.

• advertising that "contains price information that is unclear, inexact or vague";
• advertising that "states an instalment amount without stating the total cost (which is a condition of the offer)";
• advertising that "excludes reference to any existing restrictions or limitation, such as age, expiry date, geographical or restrictions on who is eligible for the offer";
• an offer of "make one consultation appointment, get one free" where the price of the first consultation is raised to largely cover the second.

On that last one, the guidelines are blunt about the word free.

They say: "Consumers generally consider the word 'free' to mean 'absolutely' free. When the costs of a 'free offer' are recouped through a price rise elsewhere or through other sources such as Medicare, the offer is not actually free."

Read those together and you see a pattern. Every item on the list is about being vague. The guidelines are happy for you to publish a fee. What they warn against is a vague hint of a fee.

So the safe way to show a price is also the most useful way. You give an exact figure, add the conditions and make it easy to find. That is a rare piece of luck for you, and almost nobody uses it. The wider rules are in my guide to the AHPRA advertising guidelines for 2026. The wording rules for dentists are in the AHPRA advertising rules for dental practices.

What should you publish instead of "affordable dentistry"?

Publish a number. Then add the conditions around that number.

Most practices say "affordable" because it feels safe. But the word is empty. It has nothing behind it. It does nothing to ease the doubt that made someone put off the visit. Worse, a patient who once got a surprise quote reads "affordable" as noise.

Here is what your fee page can show, and what each part does for you.

Notice what is missing from that list. There are no big boasts. There are no promises about how treatment will turn out. There are no patient quotes. The page works with facts you already have in your own system.

That is worth thinking about. The most useful marketing page for your dental practice has no marketing claims on it at all.

Do patient reviews count as testimonials for a dental practice?

Some reviews count as testimonials, and many do not. The line is clearer than most practices realise.

The guidelines say testimonials are "recommendations or positive statements about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service used in advertising". They then say directly that "not all reviews or positive comments made about a regulated health service are considered testimonials", and give the example of "comments about customer service or communication style that do not include a reference to clinical aspects".

The guidelines also say when a review touches clinical care. It does if it mentions one of these.

• Symptom. This is the symptom, or the reason the person came in.
• Diagnosis or treatment. This is what the dentist found, or what they did.
• Outcome. This is the result, or the dentist's skill or experience, alone or compared with others.

So say a review praises reception for explaining the bill and says you ran on time. That is not a testimonial. A review that names a toothache, a root canal or a result is one. This matters for your business. Reviews about care at the desk are the ones that ease cost worries and show people are treated well.

One warning before you get clever with this. The safest place for a review is where it already sits, on a site you do not control. Practices get into trouble when they copy reviews into their own ads. I explain what you can and cannot publish in the AHPRA rules on patient testimonials. For where the line falls on social media, see the AHPRA social media rules.

Where should a dental practice spend its budget?

Spend in the order the barriers show up. That is close to the reverse of how most practices spend.

1. The fee page, first. Make it a real page, linked in your main menu, instead of a line on the contact page. Cover the treatments people ask about most. This page speaks to the 16.1%.
2. Cost detail on every treatment page. A patient reading about a crown should not have to hunt for the price. Put it right where they ask the question.
3. The health fund and scheme explainer. Explain the steps and make no promises. Say what to check on their policy, what you need from them, and what happens on the day.
4. Practitioner pages with real credentials. Show names, registration, qualifications and what each person does. This is fully allowed, and it is what a first-time patient checks.
5. Local search presence. Now, and only now, spend on reach. It sends people to pages that can finally answer their worry.

The order is the whole point. If your site cannot answer the price question, paid ads send people back to the phone call they were avoiding. Answer the price question first. Then pay for traffic.

The ABS data shows one more thing. In 2024-25, 53.9% of Australians aged 15 and over saw a dentist. That is up slightly on the 53.2% the year before. It also means a little under half did not go at all. Some of them did not need to. A large share needed to and decided against it because of cost. You cannot win those people with more ads alone.

How do you tell whether any of it is working?

Watch what people stop ringing you about.

Look at the first question a new patient asks. Traffic numbers matter less. When your fee page works, people stop ringing to ask what a check-up costs. They ring to book one instead. Your front desk will notice before your reports do, so ask them.

Then check 3 things on your site. First, do people reach the fee page at all? Second, do they read it or leave fast? Third, do bookings from people who saw it hold up better than bookings from those who did not? For the technical side, see my guide to SEO for healthcare. To see what patients type before any of this, read what patients Google before booking.

You may want someone else to write your fee page and treatment pages so they follow the rules from the start. That is the job I do for dental clinics.

Here is the short, uncomfortable summary. Australian dentists have a problem explaining price. They keep treating it as a problem of being seen. The rules let you fix it. Most practices have simply never tried.

This article is general information for education. It is not legal advice. For a ruling on your own content, ask a lawyer who knows health advertising law, or check AHPRA's advertising hub directly.