We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick Schober a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Patrick, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

Over the last five years, Poetica Marketing has worked primarily with small and medium businesses, which means we’ve gotten really skilled at working with clients who have small and medium budgets.

One recent case study was with a tiny online record store that specializes in underground rock and metal. On a typical day, the company grosses somewhere between $100-$300, leaving a modest profit after all is said and done.

For their latest one-day anniversary sale, the owner had an interesting request: “I can’t afford much this year… What can you do for me in four hours to support this sale?”

My interest was piqued. I knew the brand from past projects, so I got to work.

I wrote out a series of personalized emails to his past customer list through Shopify, and then I worked out a sequence of social media posts that counted down to the end of the sale while tagging popular products in eye-catching photos.

Then I scheduled the entire campaign so he wouldn’t have to lift a finger.

By the end of the one-day campaign, he grossed nearly $10,000—a huge improvement over the typical $100-$300 he generates in 24 hours! With so many sales, he was bogged down for days trying to get orders out the door. He even had to hire a friend to help him process orders in his garage.

My only regret is that I didn’t have more time to work on the campaign!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I got into content marketing for love. It sounds like a sappy, romantic answer, but it’s the truth.

I’d been working as a journalist in the Philadelphia area, but I was also dating a woman (who has since become my wife) in Pittsburgh.

We dated long-distance for a few years before an opportunity appeared for me to join a digital marketing agency in Pittsburgh.

I took it.

I didn’t know anything about marketing at the time, but I could write, and my job as an editor-in-chief had pushed me to study my publication’s analytics and make informed strategic decisions based on that data.

It turned out to be a natural fit.

After a year and a half at that agency in downtown Pittsburgh (and after getting promoted to Account Director), I started Poetica Marketing. I chose the name “Poetica” from the phrase “Ars Poetica,” which translates to “The Art of Poetry” or, more broadly, “The Art of Language.”

It seemed like a good name for a copy-driven marketing agency!

The service offering has evolved over the years, but we currently focus most heavily on:

– Content Strategy – How can we generate leads through meaningful copy across a company’s website, social media, and other assets?
– Blogging – How can we demonstrate a company’s (or individual’s) expertise while driving new traffic to their website?
– SEO – How can we structure and write websites in a way to spur meaningful organic traffic?
– Social Media Management – How can we leverage free social platforms with cost-effective strategies that turn impressions into customers?
– Event Planning & Coordination – How can we turn live events into unforgettable marketing beats?

With that in mind, some of my favorite moments from the last five years have been:

– Using our marketing strategy, one of our clients temporarily ran out of parking in their two-acre lot. We scrambled and got everything sorted as quickly as we could, but it was a really nice problem to have (especially since that day led to record-breaking sales)!
– We increased one client’s monthly site traffic by nearly 600% in a few months—all from blogging. Two years later, they’re still pulling in thousands of visits per month from those blogs we wrote in a very competitive industry.
– We once generated 25 leads in 24 hours off a single social media post for a relatively small account.

Oh, and that woman who became my wife? She’s now Poetica Marketing’s Events Coordinator! So, Poetica Marketing is officially a family business, which sounds pretty great to me!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

My favorite strategy for attracting new clients has been my music blog. I’m into the rock and metal underground, so I started a blog called Monster Riff a few years ago as an SEO side project.

As I became ingrained in the scene, bands really dug the way Monster Riff was presented and how it covered their music.

Gradually, I started using Monster Riff to offer marketing services to bands.

To generate new leads, I developed a free marketing guide written just for these bands to help them position themselves better online.

This little marketing guide has been my favorite rebuttal when people say gated content (the act of collecting leads by providing exclusive content in exchange for an email address or phone number) is dead.

Gated content is not dead. Bad gated content is dead, especially in a world where so much is available via a quick Google search or ChatGPT query.

But when you develop a great project for a niche, underserved community, they’ll flock to it.

And that’s what bands have done with the marketing guide. In any given week, I’ll bring in at least half a dozen leads from that one little white paper.

From there, bands inquire about the services available through Monster Riff, including electronic press kits, PR campaigns, social media strategies, and more.

Even better: Occasionally, these musicians are also business owners themselves. Once that trust is established on the music side, we sometimes get to work together on the corporate level as well! That’s led to fun projects with music labels, record stores, and even a cool AV company.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Business is hard. Anyone who tells you differently is either incredibly lucky or playing with the cards stacked in their favor.

Growing up, my parents worked around the clock getting their business off the ground. As I got older (and before I became a business owner myself), I came to believe that working 60+ hours a week like they did is insane—at least from the outside.

I ended up asking my mom a simple question: Why did you guys work so hard?

Her answer was even simpler: We couldn’t fail.

She and my dad had five kids and a house and two cars and a business and failing would mean losing so much of what they’d worked for.

Today, as a business owner myself, I think of my mom’s response whenever business gets hard.

And for whatever reason, it seems like things get hard every couple of years or so when things hit the fan.

The first time things hit the fan was when I started Poetica Marketing.

I was emotionally broken in those first few days. I’d been working downtown at another agency, and I’d been promoted to Account Director and was tasked with essentially running half the business.

But then one of my co-workers swooped in and secretly bought the company and laid off half of the staff.

I was devastated.

In the following days, I realized I couldn’t possibly go work for someone else. I simply didn’t trust anyone else not to burn me in the same way.

So, I took my fate into my own hands.

I was still pretty green, at least when it came to marketing, so I hustled.

With one client on my roster on my first day, I’d spend the first hour of each day actually working, and then I’d spend the rest of the day chasing down meetings and networking. I then dedicated the evenings to building new skills: ad training, HTML coding, and SEO.

It was a brutal cycle.

Work. Hustle. Study.

Work. Hustle. Study.

Work.

Hustle.

Study.

Slowly, it paid off.

I finally built up a bit of recurring revenue, and then I jumped into a partnership that provided me with a steady stream of work.

As I continued to build my skills, work continued to grow.

I became savvier, quicker, and smarter.

And things were good—until they weren’t.

That partnership I mentioned earlier? It ramped up and up, month after month, until the plan was for me to come in-house as a full-time employee.

Unfortunately, as we grew, I realized we weren’t on the same page, so I left to save my sanity and stress levels.

It felt like starting over.

Sure, I had a larger core group of clients this time around, and I had a bunch of new and enhanced skills to work with.

But I wasn’t in a spot to support my family the way I wanted to.

And, once again, I was hitting the bricks.

This time, though, it only took nine months to get beyond where I’d been before. Suddenly, I was making more than I ever had before. Business was great!

I started giving back. On a monthly basis, Poetica Marketing started donating 10 hours of services to deserving nonprofits—something that helped me connect with some of the most inspiring people I know.

Once again, things were good.

And then, once again, they weren’t.

This time, I brought on a terrible client riddled with red flags because my biggest client vouched for them.

It took months of them missing meetings, fumbling dozens of hot leads, and ignoring invoices before I finally decided to fire them and move on.

They threatened not to pay, and I threatened them with court.

By the time we worked out a payment plan, word got around to my biggest client (who, apparently, wasn’t very happy with how I had handled their terrible referral).

They also decided to move on—without paying their last two invoices.

And just like that, I was out two clients.

And I was back to hustling to replace the lost business while simultaneously fighting to get paid and altering our internal processes and policies to get paid before work is delivered—all while bringing my wife (Poetica Marketing’s Events Coordinator) on as a full-time employee!

It’s been a long, weird, exhilarating road.

But I’m celebrating five years in business in July of this year, and I’m excited about that.

Because, like I said, business is hard.

But we’re pushing through.

Because we can’t fail.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.poeticamarketing.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-schober-pgh/

Image Credits
Dominique Murray Photography