I have some experience with this. I did the same thing you did, back in 2000, except 10 years later. Full court press on the DIY advertising, news interviews, local stores, etc. It sort of works. Film broke even, but very little profit.
Went a few rounds with advertising over the years, and what I eventually learned made me feel like an idiot.
Here's my 15 years of experience with advertising and piracy boiled down.
1. Quit trying to outsmart the advertising. This was my, and is everyone's biggest mistake. Just go right over to the google main desk, or facebook, etc, and start learning about strategic low cost ad deployment at scale. If you do your homework, and the following regular work, you'll find that just going the default route is literally about 20x as effective per hour/dollar than the endless workarounds filmmakers try. The months I spent hard selling that first feature could have been equivocated by dropping a few hundred bucks into the google vending machine. Not really equivocated, but really many times as effective. I still do a few extra things, like call the local news stations, make a few appearances, give stores promotional displays, etc, but the truth is, you will not save money by trying to homebrew advertising. Buy digital, buy bulk, and target carefully through the very robust existing systems. I'll be glad to help you get started if you need some help. It's actually pretty cheap.
2. Everybody quit worrying about piracy. It's not that your film won't get pirated, it's just that literally every film that's been released for the last 25 years has been pirated, and when I hear about people trying to take all these precautions, or worrying about it. it's like watching a cruise ship company try to keep changing routes and dates, to see if they can keep the boat from getting wet. Whatever money piracy will cost you, which isn't much really, you're definitely going to loose whatever you do. End of day, the impact of piracy is much lower than alarmists declare it to be. They like to take the 20 dollar sticker price of a blu ray, multiply that by every villager in turkey that downloaded the film on their phone, and then begin screaming that they have been robbed of 74 million dollars. Here's the thing. Those kids in Turkey live on 70 dollars a month, and watch 30 movies a month. The money is for food I'd assume. I'd say close to 95% of pirated films are downloaded by people who couldn't afford or had no intention of buying the film. Point being, you're not loosing as much money as you think, and even if you were, you're not going to stop it from happening, because no one has, ever. My last feature got pirated, and It made very little difference, other than that I received a few emails from Europe asking why my film didn't have subtitles.