Small Business Saturday for service shops: one offer clip per type

Small Business Saturday falls on November 28, 2026, and the SBA's own marketing advice says to tailor the offer to the type of business: fitness studios can discount memberships, accountants can promote tax preparation, caterers can promote holiday party planning. A service shop has no shelf to photograph, so the clip is the offer. Four clips cost $0.88 on Sume at flat trim and caption rates.

What the SBA recommends

The SBA's tips article, published in 2017, lists the moves below; the 2026 date comes from the SBA's observance page. Two of them mention timing and materials, which a video can reinforce.

One clip per business type

Each clip shows the offer in its real setting, for 10 to 12 seconds, with the offer written as a caption card. The service is the product, so film the place and the person doing the work.

• Fitness studio: the empty studio floor and a membership offer card.
• Accountant: a desk and a folder with the tax preparation offer card.
• Caterer: a table being set and the holiday party planning card.
• Salon: a chair and the gift certificate card.

Cut and caption

Record one 60-second walk-through at each business and cut the clip with video trim. Burn the offer with video captions using cues, so that the date, the offer and the address appear as three cards at the times you set.

Write November 28 in the cue, not "this Saturday", so the clip stays correct if it runs for a week. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds.

For a business association

If you are the neighborhood champion, one person can shoot all four and run the same recipe. Each business owns its own file, so a shop can change its offer without touching the others. Keep the offer text in a shared sheet and resubmit only the changed clip.

Ask each owner to confirm the offer and the date in writing before it is burned in. A caption cannot be edited later; it is re-rendered, which means a new caption job at $0.20.

Before you publish

Sume tools read media from your workspace, so import the recording first with POST /v1/media-imports and use the returned media.sume.com URL as the trim source. A trim needs start plus exactly one of end or duration, and precision defaults to exact, which lands on the frame you wrote down.

Captions with cues take your text with start and end seconds and skip speech-to-text, so a clip with no speech never hits caption_no_speech. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds, which is why each clip here stays well under that.

Write each card as one short sentence and date it, then re-check the source page before each season, since deadlines, rules and figures change. If you need the same words on a second clip or a different layout, pass source_caption_id to restyle an earlier caption job rather than paying for another speech-to-text pass; for authored cues, a second job at $0.20 is the simple route.