Casla Conversations… with Zoe Beard, Brand, Community and Communications Manager at Gearset

5th August 2025

Welcome to Casla Conversations – our new interview series where we speak to the people behind the strategies shaping B2B marketing. In each edition, we talk to a B2B marketing professional to hear about their career journeys, lessons learnt, and what keeps them inspired.

Casla Conversations spotlight the human stories behind the job titles, with plenty of actionable insights and knowledge thrown in, too. This month, we spoke to Zoe Beard, Brand, Community and Communications Manager at Gearset . We first met Zoe at one of our B2B marketing drinks and discussion events, and it was great to hear about her journey from agency to client-side, her voluntary work, and how she uses TikTok for B2B marketing inspiration.

Zoe Beard, Brand, Community and Communications Manager

From agency to client-side

Zoe’s career path has evolved from working at a PR agency to embracing the many facets of marketing in client-side roles, leading her to specialise in brand marketing. In 2015, Zoe started working at PR agency Platform, which specialises in B2B technology across media and entertainment, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. She then moved to video streaming solutions provider Bitmovin, where she headed up PR and Comms and supported on brand marketing.

‘It was at Bitmovin where I learned a lot more about marketing, because when you're in a PR agency, you forget that PR is just one aspect of marketing,’ Zoe comments. ‘It made me understand the customer journey, the data side of marketing, and more about the power of brand marketing.

‘I got my teeth into organic and paid social media, built an employee advocacy program and supported partner marketing. That was a big eye-opener for me, and I think that's when I really started to want to formally transition into brand marketing.

‘So I've felt quite lucky that I've been able to do that at Gearset. I sit within the brand team, and PR is one of the things I do, but it's not the only thing I do now. It just means that my role is a lot more varied, mentally stimulating and fun.’

'Brand marketers can't work in isolation'

‘Brand marketing focuses on the awareness part of the customer journey. So it's raising brand awareness and creating positive brand recognition. A great example is the McDonald's golden arches – it’s recognised globally. Every brand aspires to have that level of brand recognition among its customers and prospective customers, where they know what the company does and its products.

‘It’s achieving that through a mixture of things, whether it's social media, public relations, or customer advocacy. It's raising that awareness and getting people to notice the brand. And it helps them move further down the funnel into that consideration stage and hopefully convert into customers.

‘One of the big things I've learned in my career is that sometimes people think, “brand is just brand,” and people think it's hard to track the ROI. Showing the ROI of brand marketing is something I've been trying to do more of in my career – for example, by showing how organic social can be attributed to opportunities or leads and things like that. It just requires working more with the marketing ops team,’ says Zoe.

‘I think a lot of brand marketers are starting to understand that we can't just work in isolation and kind of say, “Well, it's just brand.” No, you need to work with your team to track and find the data and show how it's making an impact.’

‘We can all find 30 minutes a month to give back’

Outside of work, Zoe is involved with lots of organisations, including the Taylor Bennett Foundation, Bridging Barriers and Sheffield DocFest. ‘I do quite a lot of voluntary work because I understand that it's really hard for young people, especially these days. You read the news, and it feels like everything's on fire.

‘I know the job market can be quite tough for young people, so I definitely wanted to give back, and for me, mentoring people, whether it's helping them map out a five-year plan or reviewing their CV or doing mock interviews with them, it’s been really rewarding.’ Zoe shares.

‘I'm from Sheffield originally, and I think Sheffield is a city with so much potential. I just want to give back to Sheffield and show that there is amazing stuff going on here.

‘We can all find 30 minutes a month to mentor someone or to give back to a community. I think it's really important and I've learnt a lot from it,’ says Zoe. She adds that it was by connecting and talking with young people that she learnt that TikTok has become one of the biggest search engines among Gen Z. ‘They’ve taught me a lot,’ she says.

3 tips for a more effective marketing and PR strategy

Differentiation begins with your product

How do tech companies stand out from the crowd? ‘I think differentiation starts before the marketing. It starts with the product,’ says Zoe. ‘You have to have a good product, you can't get away from that. You can have the best marketing campaign in the world, but if people don't like your products, then they aren’t going to stick around.

‘Having a good product comes from understanding what problem you're solving and going out and talking to prospects and customers and using that feedback to make it the best.

‘And then the marketing comes in, in terms of understanding, “How do we best differentiate ourselves?”, “How do we stack up against competitors?”, “What gaps are we plugging in the market?”.’

PR does deliver on ROI, but it needs persistence and creativity

‘For me, the idea that PR doesn't deliver ROI is a PR myth,’ says Zoe. ‘In previous roles, I have been able to show that the newsroom page was the second most-visited place on the website for influencing opportunities.

‘That shows me that PR is not just brand awareness that exists in this vacuum. It can be an important consideration for prospective customers. And it's all about shifting that perception of a company or managing that perception of a company. B2B sales cycles are quite long, but we can show where PR is in the customer journey.

‘Persistence is a good thing in PR, but not just being persistent in chasing journalists – being persistent in not just giving up if an angle doesn't work. Maybe you need to reframe it. Maybe you need to find a different perspective.

‘I think you have to consume a lot of news and you have to be creative – I think that's especially true in B2B because it's so much harder. Maybe there's an angle that you've not thought of. There are a lot of tech vendors, so you have to have a unique perspective on something to even get the attention of a journalist.’

Employee advocacy is key to social media reach

LinkedIn has grown in use over the past few years, and the algorithm favours individual creators over company pages. One way to extend social reach to a wider audience is employee advocacy.

‘What I've done at my previous companies is create an employee advocacy program where people become advocates for the brand and share company content, but it's also encouraging them to build their own personal brands,’ says Zoe. ‘And that way you can extend the reach of your brands, the brand recognition and the brand reach on social media through your employees' networks.

‘If you work in a tech company, then your product team is probably going to have different connections, and your engineering team and your sales team and customer success team might be connected to people that aren't necessarily following your brand’s accounts. But you can help turn your employees into brand advocates and reach them that way.

‘It's a balance because you don't want people to be resharing blogs mindlessly. You want them to be showing their perspective, ideally having a bit of that personal brand stuff – maybe they ran a half marathon at the weekend, or they had a great team social. It’s about finding a balance and showing a bit of personality from the person behind the post.

‘At the end of the day, even when businesses are selling to businesses, there are still humans within those businesses, and that's who's buying. So you want to show the human side of your brand so people feel more connected to it.’

Away from the desk

Currently reading and listening to...

‘Oktopost, an employee advocacy platform, has a great podcast called Behind the Post. It's about marketing leaders sharing how they launch their employee advocacy programs – it's really interesting and quite bite-sized,’ says Zoe.

‘Another podcast I listen to is the High Performance Podcast. I always find that good in understanding how athletes in very high-performance sports manage teams and how they look at success. I read a lot of books around personal growth. I do like a self-help book.’

Food, travel and evenings in

‘My husband and I are quite big foodies. We had a date night last night, and we went to Berenjak in London, which does Persian food. It doesn't have to be super fancy – as long as it's good food. The Orange Bird in Sheffield is really good, that's probably my favourite restaurant in Sheffield.

‘My husband is half Bulgarian, so we go to Bulgaria every summer. I’ve probably seen more of Bulgaria than I have of the UK! I've been to all the beaches and the mountains.

‘We're going to the Azores islands in Portugal in a couple of weeks, and Mexico later in the year. So I’d say travelling is one of my favourite things, especially because I'm a home worker. I love Sheffield, but sometimes a bit of a change of scenery helps. And then when I'm at home, it's just me and my husband chilling with our cat.’

Quick-fire questions

Tool you can’t live without?

‘I think it’s TikTok. I get a lot of ideas for social on TikTok,’ Zoe says. ‘I mean, sometimes I'm just watching videos of tortoises eating fruit, but it does give me a lot of ideas.’

Zoe highlights the importance of maintaining brand authority in B2B marketing, but says that TikTok trends can be a great way to bring something fresh to social media posts.

What was the last great piece of B2B content that you saw?

'A company called HockeyStack did a great parody video about a child coming down with a condition called "B2B Marketing." It’s so funny. I chuckle whenever I think about it.'

Favourite marketing buzzword (that you secretly love)?

'I love "Viral Marketing" because it’s kind of ironic, because the best (in my opinion) viral content happens completely unintentionally, and that’s the beauty of it. Could anyone have predicted that ‘Pretty Little Baby,’ a song made in 1962, would go viral 60 years later on social media? Or that a Jet2 holiday advert voiceover would become a meme and be the audio for videos that would rack up millions and millions of views?'