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For many shoppers, Black Friday is mostly an online affair. Small businesses often struggle to market themselves as effectively as big-box stores during big sales events. But that’s where Small Business Saturday comes in handy.
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Held every year on the day after Black Friday, this special day gives independent shops, local businesses, makers, and artists a chance to boost both their sales and their visibility. However, small businesses that want to take advantage of the day need to promote their participation with posters, flyers, and ads that announce the event or their deals to maximize the opportunity.
Fortunately, with AI, promoting a business is easier than ever and surprisingly inexpensive.
In this guide, I’ll show you how simple it is to create an 18×24 poster, an A5 flyer, and a set of social slides and campaign ads using free or nearly free AI tools. That way, you can prepare your own Small Business Saturday campaign well before the event, to help you attract more shoppers.
How to use free AI tools to design marketing assets
What you’ll need: I mention a few different examples in this guide. To follow along, you’ll need accounts with ChatGPT, Canva, Gemini, and Google for Pomelli. You can get started with free accounts if you don’t have subscriptions. I have paid accounts, so in my screenshots below, you may notice I’m logged into ChatGPT Plus, Google AI Pro, and Canva Pro, but they’re not required.
Canva is a powerful AI design suite. It’s so good that, after 20 years of being an Adobe loyalist, I made the switch a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back. It’s packed with tools that make creating as simple as a click. In Canva’s Magic Studio, for example, there’s Magic Grab, which can isolate parts of an image for further editing. There’s also a background remover, an eraser, an expander, and more.
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Not all of Magic Studio is free, though. The free Canva plan includes limited access to AI tools like Magic Write (up to 25 prompts), plus select uses of Magic Design. Many Canva features are exclusive to Canva Pro, which costs $15 per month. Still, compared to hiring a designer, it’s a good deal. Canva is free to use if you don’t want to subscribe, so you can still experiment with non-paywalled features without spending a cent.
The best part? Free ChatGPT also now works with Canva. OpenAI recently made its “apps” feature available to all logged-in users across every plan. You’ll just need to connect Canva within ChatGPT first, but after that, generating designs like a poster is as easy as typing a prompt. Here’s how:
- Connect ChatGPT to Canva. You need to log in to both ChatGPT and Canva. Then, in ChatGPT, go to your profile icon > Settings > Apps and Connectors, select Canva, and connect it to your signed-in account.
- Generate your poster in ChatGPT. Enter a prompt in ChatGPT to create your poster. For example: “Create an 18×24 poster for Small Business Saturday in Canva. I’m a metaphysical shop that sells crystals, herbs, potions, books, and coffee. I’m having a sale on crystals after Black Friday.”
- Choose a design. ChatGPT will generate several poster templates. Click one to expand it, then select Open in Canva in the top corner to edit your design directly in Canva.
- Customize your poster. Now you can start fine-tuning your design. Canva Pro users can upload logos and create brand templates to instantly apply their fonts and colors. Free users can still edit every element — text, colors, fonts, and images — manually. You can also upload your logo as an image and use the color picker to adjust the design’s palette. The free plan includes thousands of templates, icons, and export options.
- Refine with prompts. If you prefer less manual editing, make your prompt to ChatGPT more detailed. Include your brand’s color codes, upload a logo, mention a store name or the event date, and specify any callouts, such as “Exclusive in-store deals.” If you want the images in the design to have a specific look, such as hyper-realistic, then specify that. Just keep refining through prompts until you get a final design you like and want to use.
- Export or print. When you’re done, open the design in Canva and go to Share > Download > PDF Print. Choose RGB for digital use or CMYK for printing yourself. You can also select Print with Canva, which showed me an 18×24 no-frame poster print for $69 with free delivery, plus additional options for frames and finishes.
In minutes, you’ve created a Small Business Saturday poster that’s ready to display in your store to promote your sales and business. You can create the poster entirely for free using Canva and ChatGPT — or, if you choose to spend a little, you can unlock Canva Pro tools and even print it.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Prefer Gemini over Canva? No problem. Gemini makes it easy to design everything from presentations to flyers. For example, I used it to create a compact A5 flyer for in-store handouts and slides for social media posts. You don’t even need a separate app connection like Canva since Gemini generates images for free.
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In my experience, Gemini can produce layouts and infographics from a simple text prompt. Here’s how:
- Open the Gemini mobile app on iOS or Android (or go to gemini.google.com on desktop). Select Create Images from the tool menu by the prompt field.
- Enter your prompt. As I said before, be specific. For example: “Create an A5 flyer for Small Business Saturday at The Enchanted Shop. Use bold headline ‘See you Saturday!,’ include date/time (Saturday, Nov. 29, 2025) and location (Malone, NY), text ‘Show this flyer for 10% off in-store,’ and use hyper-realistic images of crystals. Use brand colors #cfff4b (energy yellow), #003fc6 (blue), #000000 (black), #ffffff (white).”
- Gemini should instantly draft a flyer layout. If you don’t like it, refine your prompt until you get a design that makes you happy.
Gemini also includes a built-in Canvas mode — an interactive workspace available to all users — that you can use to make slides. If you subscribe to Google AI Pro for $19.99 per month, you can access Canvas with Google’s most capable model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is best for complex projects.
I really enjoyed trying Canvas. Although it’s meant for generating multi-slide presentations with typical slide sizes, you can export the entire deck to Google Slides to edit further. I imagined using these slides on Facebook — like a post gallery — so users could click through to learn more about my Small Business Saturday sale. Here’s how.
- Open Gemini Canvas. In the Gemini app or website, select Canvas in the tool menu by the prompt field.
- Enter your prompt. Use specific instructions. Gemini will create a draft.
- Edit the design. You can upload your logo to use or ask it to adjust any auto-generated text or elements.
- Open in Slides. Here, you can manually edit the designs in Google Slides. It includes features for generating images, uploading assets, enabling one-click templates, and adjusting background, layout, theme, colors, and fonts. It won’t be A5 size, but in seconds, you’ll have marketing materials you can download and share online.
- Export your design. When done, download your file as a PDF or PNG. The PDF (at about 300 DPI) can go to your printer for an A5 run, and the PNG can be shared digitally.
Now that you’ve created posters, flyers, and slides to share online or in person, let’s talk about ads. For this task, you can try Pomelli, Google’s new AI marketing assistant. It lets you easily generate social and display ad graphics.
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Pomelli is a Google Labs/DeepMind experiment that analyzes your website to build a “Business DNA” (color palette, fonts, tone), then automatically generates tailored marketing assets such as posts, banners, and ads based on that DNA. It’s perfect for SMBs that want on-brand campaign creatives.
Since I made up a metaphysical shop for this article, I don’t have an actual site for it to use. So I used www.zdnet.com in Pomelli:
- Sign up for Pomelli. Go to labs.google.com/pomelli. (It’s free, currently in public beta in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and available to those with a Google account.)
- Build your Business DNA. Enter your website. Pomelli will crawl it to extract your brand colors, fonts, tone, and images. Once it loads your Business DNA, you can edit what it shows — from the logo, fonts, colors, tagline, brand aesthetic, to the voice, overview, and images. Just click into each one to customize. When done, click Looks good.
- Customize campaigns. Pomelli will now show you campaigns that you can download and use in your advertising. On a campaign design, go to More > Duplicate to adjust its size (like feed 4:5 or square 1:1). You can also click Add creative at the bottom of the campaign screen to describe additional campaigns you want to make, such as a story (9:16) to share. Click into any campaign design to fix the layout, add a call to action, or change the image, header, and description.
- Download your campaign. When done, click your campaign and go to More > Download to get the asset, which you can then use for advertising. These are ready to upload to social websites, like Facebook and Instagram, or any digital ad platform you prefer.
You still run your ad campaign (for example, using Facebook Ads Manager or Google Ads). But for creative assets on a shoestring budget, Pomelli can save you hours compared with manual design.
You’re all set for Small Business Saturday
With this approach, you can quickly produce everything needed for Small Business Saturday — printed posters, flyers, and slides, and a suite of digital ads — all for free or on a low budget. You can place your posters in shop windows, distribute flyers, post the slide assets to social, and run paid ad campaigns. If you do, you’ll perhaps see a noticeable bump in traffic this year.
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In my experience, most of these AI tools do the work almost magically. I still had the opportunity to guide the design and make edits. However, using ChatGPT (free) for text prompts, Canva’s Magic Studio, Google Gemini Canvas, and Google Pomelli let me iterate and finalize all my designs in about an hour total — versus days or spending hundreds of dollars hiring a designer.
Do I have to pay for ChatGPT, Canva, Gemini, or Pomelli?
No. You can use free ChatGPT (it now includes advanced models) to brainstorm copy or generate designs. Free Canva is also quite powerful for this task, although Canva Pro includes premium templates and unlocks several built-in AI tools. Gemini, Gemini Canvas mode, and Pomelli are also all free to use, but you can upgrade your Gemini subscription to work on more complex projects.
Can I edit assets, or am I stuck with what the AI outputs?
Yes. You can and should customize. Just think of the AI output as a starting point.
You can change colors, swap generated images for actual photos, edit text, move elements, add your logo, and more. The idea is to use AI for speed, but the final product should be something you’re proud to share and promote.
What is Small Business Saturday?
Small Business Saturday is an annual sale event held the day after Black Friday. It’s meant to encourage people to shop at small, local businesses. American Express started the annual sale about 15 years ago, and it’s now co-sponsored by the Small Business Administration.
Should I hire a designer for Small Business Saturday?
One could argue you should give graphic designers some of your business for Small Business Saturday. However, the point of this article is that AI tools are available for free to do the heavy lifting so every small-business owner can participate and make the most of the holiday season.
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With little to no money, you can hang posters in your window, hand out flyers to every customer, and share social graphics. The more channels you use, the more turnout you could drive after Black Friday, regardless of your budget.
Because, let’s be honest, most small businesses don’t have lots of cash to spend — and that’s OK. Maybe, at the very least, you can hire a designer to create an event logo or a photographer to capture your products on sale, and then use those with available AI tools to create your marketing assets.
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