How Indie Hits Build Big Audiences Without Big Budgets | Dor Dotson and Matt Delman (Genuine Impression)

“The only way you can fail is being too scared to try something!”

Mar 18, 2025

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Dor Dotson is the President of Genuine Article, a company specializing in social media management for films, with over 15 years of experience in entertainment market research. Matt Delman is the founder of 3rd Impression, a boutique digital marketing agency focused on social media advertising for independent films. He is also editor-at-large for Hammer to Nail, the film publication founded by Corbin Day and

Ted Hope

. Together, Dor and Matt launched Genuine Impression to provide comprehensive digital campaigns for Oscar-hopefuls.

In our conversation, we discuss:

Building an organic following for your indie film
When to start paid advertising
Does your film really need to be on TikTok
A TikTok case study for indie film: Dinner in America
An organic growth case study for indie film: The Cat Rescuers
What to actually budget for social media and ad buying
Loads of growth tactics you can implement today

Key Takeaways:

As you structure your digital strategy, think about two things:
1. What platforms your film should be on.
2. What is right for your film to post on those platforms.
Start early and claim social handles: "I always recommend at least planting a flag and claiming those handles when you have your title."
1. Secure social media handles early, even if you don't plan to use them immediately.
2. Always have at least a Facebook and Instagram account at a minimum. You may find out your people aren’t on those platforms but if you ever do want to run ads, you need these accounts anyway.
3. Grab them no later than when you know the date of your first festival.
  1. Ask friends and family to follow. This way you have some audience built up.
  2. There is no substitute for time (“unless you have $500K”)
  3. At festivals the audience will want to find and tag your film. Having a few hundred people (even if it’s just friends and fam) following those accounts will look like great groundswell.
4. Be creative with handle names if your preferred options are taken. E.g., The Substance used “trythesubstance”when their title was taken.
Every so often there’s a film that “has” to be on TikTok.
1. If a film has a younger demo or if there’s subject matter crossover (e.g., music) it may do well on TikTok.
2. If you’re stressed about TikTok, forgive yourself. It’s not the place that will sell tix to a festival premiere anyway.
3. If you have someone on your team that is excited about TikTok and knows the platform then let them at it.
4. You do need to post 4-5 times a week, otherwise little / no benefit.
Case Study: occasionally the benefit of TikTok will come later: e.g., Dinner in America
1. 2020: Premiered at Sundance, no distribution offers.
2. 2022: Came out, did a marketing campaign including TikTok. Did well and got to #1 on Apple which led to Hulu deal.
3. 2024: Went viral on TikTok because people loved the Watermelon song from the film.
4. Late 2024: It got a second life and is now back in theaters because of TikTok popularity (see article below).
Don't spend money on paid advertising until there's a clear call-to-action.
1. Focus on building an organic following before investing in paid ads.
2. Use paid advertising when you have a specific goal, like ticket sales or VOD releases.
3. Facebook can accommodate any budget you have, even if that’s $10. By contrast Variety (or any Penske Media publication), Fandango, IMDB, etc. all have $25K minimums for ad spend.
When ad-buying for indie films, always start with Meta.
1. The Meta ecosystem includes: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Marketplace, Audience Network, etc.
  1. FB and IG accounts have to be linked.
  2. Meta will autoserve 90% of your ads on FB, because IG is more expensive so make sure you’re trying some IG-only ads so enough ads are being served on each platform.
2. If you have some additional marketing budget, then it’s worth trying other platforms: e.g., TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Try lots of creative options especially if you have ads running over a long period of time.
1. Try to sequence what you share starting with the trailer and poster.
2. Switch to 15-sec or 30-sec spots when it’s time to buy tickets or VOD.
During pre-production and production you have time to start to build an organic following:
1. Think about 1. who is your audience and 2. what are they going to want to see?
2. Case study: The Cat Rescuers
  1. Started working on the account during post-production
  2. Assumed the audience would be cat-owners who are 25% of the US population but in the beginning the perfect audience is even more niche. For this film it was actual cat rescuers.
  3. Engaged this community leading to 5000 followers before release:
    1. “tell us who is your favorite cat rescue”
    2. Noted that the cat rescue community is unsung. “Nominate someone in your community.” Created a Google form.
3. Think about what people like to share. Things that are interesting. Things that uplift the work that they are doing directly.
4. Build existing in person relationship with people who are going to care about your film. For The Cat Rescuers they met those people at a Cat Bloggers conference and they became evangelists.
“The only way you can fail is being too scared to try something!” Be in experimentation mode. Try different stuff. If it doesn’t work, you didn’t “fail,” you have a data point!
Influencer marketing may not always lead to ticket sales but it does build awareness.
1. "If you don't have the budget for influencer marketing, leverage your own influencers and partners strategically."
2. Identify smaller influencers who align with your film's niche and offer them incentives or exclusive content to promote your film.
3. Prepare social media toolkits to make it easy for partners to share your content.
"We've spent anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000 on social ads, depending on the release scale."
1. Allocate budget based on the number of theaters or distribution channels.
2. Geo-target ads to maximize local impact.
3. $250K would be for a 2000-theater wide release but $300 on a smaller city can be effective.
4. Some larger indie theaters have marketing teams like IFC Center or Film Forum
  1. A theater like IFC will be able to optimize ads for conversion instead of link clicks. The average purchase is usually two-tickets or $28 and to acquire that customer, IFC Center was spending $7.
Tactics to implement today:
1. Ask everyone in your Q&A’s to follow your film’s handles. Example: At TIFF a well-known filmmaker said to the 1,200 person audience, “We don’t have a huge marketing budget. So hold up your phone. Now follow our handles.” Prompt audience members to follow and tell them to tag you in posts.
2. Look at other films for inspiration. Look specifically at films that are comps for yours. What are they doing? And what did they do at the exact stage you are in?
3. If you don’t have money for marketing then make sure to give yourself time.
4. Video is great to share on social (BTS, etc.), but don’t feel like you have to post footage from your film (there are awards rules of course but also images and videos from your film are precious so use them strategically).
5. Social media is changing all the time so to future-proof your marketing start growing an email list.

What do you think?

What indie film marketing tactics have worked best for you? Reply and let us know—we’d love to learn from you!

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