Every event supplier is told to "get listed everywhere". It is bad advice. A listing you never update is worse than no listing - it puts a dead phone number and a 2023 price in front of someone ready to book. Four listings you maintain beat twenty you have forgotten about, and the four are fairly predictable.
Start with the free one that outranks everything
If you do one thing this week, claim and fill in your Google Business Profile. For "wedding photographer near me" or "marquee hire Truro", it is what decides whether you appear on the map at the top of the page, and it costs nothing. Fill in every field, set your service area honestly, add real photographs rather than logos, and ask happy clients to review you there rather than anywhere else.
Second, your own website - even a single page. Everything else on this list is somebody else's platform, subject to somebody else's pricing changes. The one page nobody can take away from you is the one you own.
The kinds of listing, and what each is for
| Kind | Examples | Usually costs | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search engine profile | Google Business Profile, Bing Places | Free | Always. This is the highest-return hour in the whole list |
| Event marketplaces | Plan My Do, Poptop, Add to Event, Bark | Free to commission or per-lead, depending on the site | When the charging model suits you - work out your real cost per booking first |
| Wedding-specific directories | The large national wedding sites | Usually a paid annual listing | When weddings are most of your work and you can name the bookings that came from it |
| Local and regional directories | Cornwall tourism and "what's on" sites, town and parish listings | Free or small | Low volume, but locally trusted and often surprisingly well ranked for Cornish searches |
| Trade bodies and accreditations | Your trade association, accreditation schemes | Membership fee | When the badge itself reassures a customer - insurance, food hygiene, safety-critical hire |
| Community and social | Village Facebook groups, local business networks | Free | For genuinely local work. A recommendation in a village group outperforms most paid listings for small jobs |
Get the details identical everywhere
Search engines use the consistency of your business details across the web as a signal that you are a real, findable business. Two spellings of your own address genuinely costs you visibility, and it is the easiest thing on this page to fix.
How many is too many
Pick the two free ones at the top, one or two marketplaces whose charging model you are comfortable with, and one local or trade listing that fits what you do. That is four to five, all of which you can genuinely keep current. Anything beyond that should have to earn its place by producing a booking you can name - and before you renew a paid one, run the arithmetic in what paid leads actually cost you in a year.
Ask every enquiry where they found you
One question, asked every time, answers a question no analytics dashboard will: which listings are actually sending you work. After a season you will know exactly which of them to renew.
Where we fit, honestly
Plan My Do is an event marketplace, and a young one - we are not going to pretend to be the biggest thing on the list. A profile is free, there is no per-lead charge and nobody bids for position; hosts describe what they are planning and are shown the suppliers that fit it. That makes us a sensible thing to keep alongside whatever else is working, rather than a reason to cancel it. If the enquiries are not coming, how matching works explains what your profile is actually being read for, and what to put on a supplier profile is the practical version of the same thing.
Add a free listing that costs nothing per enquiry
Set up a profile in a few minutes, and get matched against what hosts in Cornwall have actually described.
List your business