Most startups fail...so if businesses see your failure as a flaw then you probably don't want to be working for them as well. There was a reason Facebook's internal mantra use to be Build Fast and Break Things (until they scaled). At the end of the day your failures are what will really define you. How do you bounce back? What did you learn? I believe you would be able to find a job easily. However, the question, a person on a marketing, sales, pm team may really wonder is why you leave your passion of being an entrepreneur to sit at someone else's desk other than to collect a check? It has nothing to do with failure and everything to do with are you really passionate.

First it depends on the platform that you are marketing on. Mobile or desktop? There are a lot of way as mentioned below my answer. You can buy ppc ads against your competitors keywords on google. You can run targeted ads on Facebook that target people who are connected to your competitors. There are actually some grey area platforms that can data mine social platforms as well and you can use them to create Look A Like/Custom Audience clusters which you can use to target. These are just a couple ways to hit your competitors customers.

At the end of the day if you are looking for paid specific acquisition/marketing it is expensive when you are competing against the larger companies because typically they are buying traffic on a much more aggressive eCPM for relevant traffic. Again understand your competitor but I recommend as a small to mid sized business focusing on organic traffic and building more competitive social components in your strategy so that you have a strong viral k-factor. Ensure that your existing customers are strong and loyal so that they do all the advertising for you. (E.g referral traffic). You will end up eating their market share incrementally provided your business is retaining customers.

The most obvious place to start is potentially Upwork and Angelist. A ton of companies need both paid/organic growth consulting. You can also hit up LinkedIn to find companies that potentially need agency/consultant help.

The one caveat is a lot of these companies are either bootstrapped and or just got an initial round of funding which I am assuming is being spent on engineering resources and potentially some initial growth to get some traction.

A couple tips to get some paid growth gigs for your agency:
Upwork, CloudPeeps, Angelist, and Growth Geeks are places to start.

You need to be aggressive and hound for paid/organic growth work. There are a lot of people who do this as well as tons of agencies. You also have to understand what type of pay you will get since as you are an agency vs. a individual consultant. (Unless your a 1 man agency.)

Lastly networking is a great way to meet companies. Go to happy hours/meetups/conferences and meet people on the growth teams at more established startups/companies if you can. Meet them and potentially pitch to offer services at a latter date. Put together compelling reasons why your added % take in addition to actual paid user acquisition is worth it to their overall growth strategy.

Finally, understand that there is also an increasing shift to bring mobile UA in house, so thats definitely something to consider.

Personally, I think you should be focusing heavily on your current users that are loyal to your brand currently and worry less on trying to buy users and get more brand awareness. To be frank you should be letting your strongest customers do all the promotion for you organically. "K-factor" This is how why you see businesses that get super big out of nowhere with practically nil paid marketing budgets.

One of the differences of the David v Goliath mentality is companies believe they need to take on Goliath. The truth is, however, your company can operate at a high level by offering your customers the best services, prices, quality, etc that you can and be focused completely on the customer experience.

The problem is by trying to compete with your competitors you are wasting all your money/time trying to beat or get market share vs. building a high quality business.

Focus on acquiring the customers you can through traditional paid, organic channels however stop focusing on trying to compete for market share. Focus on your product/business and ensuring that you have high retention %/ repeat users/payers, etc.

I worked at Lyft and to be honest we had that mentality vs. Uber who are essentially monsters compared to us. "Oh how will Lyft ever make a dent in Uber's market share" They have more money, resources, etc. The difference, however, was the customer experience with Lyft. Lyft, overall, is friendlier, and a better experience IMHO. Thus, you now see Lyft making major strides in market share in the ride-sharing economy.

At the end of the day, IMHO eventually the customer experience, product etc. will help you organically eat into enough market share.

Hey There,

I think really its more about the target you want to reach for the documentary. Social platforms are great because they do provide the targeting options. Personally, I would try promoting to your intended demographic via Facebook, and Twitter.

Try making sure that you target people that align with interest in comedians, arts, documentaries etc. Narrow down your demographic as much as possible. This will help to ensure that you get people that will actually want to fund your campaigns vs. wasting ad dollars on showing impressions to people that wont click.

I would start with advertising on Facebook, and then eventually move to Twitter ads. It's a great place to start for paid advertising.

Hello there,

I have been working in Mobile Acquistion for large mobile gaming companies for a while and can definitely understand the confusion, and sometimes frustration when trying to figure out the Mobile App ecosystem, especially as it relates to tracking and attribution.

To say there is a best one is subjective. MMP's or "mobile mediation partners" essentially act as a middle man to ensure that when you work with multiple advertisers that the appropriate advertiser gets credit for an install driven.

A lot of partners do this well. Adjust, Tune, Kochava, Fiksu, etc. However, I am bias because I work with MobileApptracking "Tune"as they call themselves now.

Variance:
Mobile attribution is not an exact science and to say that FB Mobile App Install Ads are 100% accurate is incorrect. Typically you have to accept a level of a variance with nearly every sort of tracking solution. This ranges typically from 5-10%. Anyone who says tracking is 100% accurate doesn't have to look through the logs I have had to look through lol.

Facebook Tracking:
Facebook doesn't have a specific integration with the iOS/GP app store..you are actually integrating your app via the Facebook SDK, or via the Facebook API so it tracks in-app events including the install event. They are getting the install data from your app not the app store. It is fed via the integration you have setup with your app.

How Mobile Tracking Works:
If you understand the concept of ad tracking itself, you will understand that this is "confirmation." How mobile tracking works is like this:

User see's ad and clicks => redirect to MMP (on the redirect usually this is where device information is stored) => redirect to GP/iOS Store where the user may/may not download.

Please also keep in mind that you have integrated the MMP's SDK at this point!!

At this point a bunch of logs of clicks are stored for advertisers. Once a user has installed the tracking partner then is able to see where the install came from based on the click logs that were stored. Attribution then happens based on the default methodology. This methodology as is called last click attribution. So if Advertiser A,B,C all drove clicks but Advertiser C's click is the last. They would get credit.

The gentleman above me is also correct in that there are standard ID identifiers (IDFA, and GAID) that are collected in these logs to ensure that there isn't any breaking in attribution. There is actually an order of attribution in identifiers, but I don't want to confuse you here and Ill leave that for a diff. conversation.

De-Duplication:
If you are working with multiple ad partners there tends to be some overlap in inventory. So if you are running with 4 ad partners and all 4 have clicks from the same user, and one installs...all 4 will claim that install. MMP's help facilitate the attribution to the appropriate install claimer. This is called "de-duplication" Remember, again, you have their SDK integrated so they do have confirmation of an install event so there isn't "correlative" information it is confirmation of an install of your application.

Takeaway:
IMHO opinion given the fact you may want to advertise across more than just Facebook, the best solution would be to integrate both the Facebook SDK, and a MMP's SDK. This will give you the flexibility to not only track Facebook accurately but to attribute across multiple certified MMP ad partners.

Given the fact that Facebook is very pricey at this point in terms of CPMs it makes sense to look for more affordable networks, exchanges, etc to acquire users.

Social media is very useful for B2B SaaS companies. The level of targeting on places such as Twitter and Facebook are very useful to hit the right people/companies. LinkedIn is also another useful tool for B2B Advertising.

On Twitter/Facebook, you can potentially target users of your SAAS, or create look-a-like audiences of your existing users by uploading custom audience lists.

You can potentially target business handles on Twitter, targeting people that are part of say a marketing group facebook page.

There are a number of targeting possibilities to hit the right audience.

Remember that the users of your product use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn specifically.

To be honest leveraging Facebook and Twitter is probably as useful and sometimes more valuable LinkedIn Ads.

You can also work to build a social community within Facebook and Twitter, potentially, to engage with your current users, and potentially run promotions, engagement campaigns, etc.

This totally varies, as you increase targeting, with Look-a-likes, custom audiences, retargeting, etc your CPI should theoretically come down as your most relevant users convert better.

Typical CPIs range but typically can sit as low $5CPI or as high as $25CPI again depending on the cohorts you are trying to reach. Typically gaming is pretty competitive with companies, individuals, bidding very aggressively on an oCPM against potential paying player mobile gaming cohorts.

Facebook moved away from the precise interest targeting they had as they have been looking for people to upload custom audiences and create look-a-like audiences of your existing customers. These, theoretically, depending on your vertical, again should convert much better than interest targeting.

At 3M+ Impressions per day what is your exact fill %? Also what is your breakdown of impressions by platform You can potentially look to other ad partners to fill your supply. You can either plug into other ad-exchanges, the inventory that is not getting filled. The business model is the same, you are selling ads on CPM basis, you essentially just need to plug in the best ad SDKs as possible to fill as much inventory as possible.

Google Admob has relatively decent targeting, however, there are other options to ensure you get a high fill %.

My advice would be to plug your ad inventory into the exchanges. (e.g. Mopub, etc)