Google Workspace

Creating a framework for social content that wins over Gen Z

Google Workspace is probably a tool you use daily. More than 3 billion people all over the world use Docs, Slides, Sheets, or one of the other tools available on the platform.

To make sure that Gen Z, who are just now entering the workforce, was taking advantage of Google Workspace, the team at DEPT® helped create a strategy for reaching a notoriously hard-to-reach audience.

On brand and on culture

Our team has been working with Google since 2019 to help them remain on the cutting edge of culture and conversation–with work driving social activations.

Through the four years our team has worked with Google, our partnerships have grown organically and expanded to other brands under the Google umbrella, including Google Maps, Google Shopping, Google Social Labs, and, of course, Google Workspace.

Working with Google Workspace required our team to draw upon their extensive experience reaching Gen Z, the digitally native generation that is notoriously hard to reach.

To ensure that the brand was successfully reaching Gen Z, we helped Google Workspace create a social strategy with an end goal of making their social channels the #1 must-follow accounts for the latest in Workspace productivity hacks.

Creating for a generation of digital natives

Having been steeped in digital content from birth, Gen Z has a knack for spotting—and scrolling past—advertisements or sponsored posts in just fractions of a second.

As a result, Zoomers have earned their hard-to-reach reputation. That said, from our perspective, reaching Gen Z is simply a matter of creating content that aligns with their values, which include a heavy emphasis on creativity, storytelling, and aesthetics.

Collaborating with creators is one of the best ways to reach Gen Z today, because creators offer a through line to those values that results in content that works, on an organic and sponsored level.

Through our work with other Google brands, we knew from firsthand experience that for Google Workspace, to succeed with their social channels they needed to build a strategy around partnering with creators.

A framework for creator-driven content

To ensure that Google Workspace could focus branded content around creator partnerships without creators losing their personal styles, we built a framework for content creation that found footing with both brand and creator.

One of the most successful videos was one created in collaboration with Roman Adolfo (@romanlolo), a creator known for his filmmaking skills. We challenged Roman to make a seriously spooky movie scene using Google Workspace. He delivered.

The video went live on Halloween 2022 and delivered 1.3 million views in under 24 hours. Within two weeks we more than doubled that, hitting 3.5 million views and amassing hundreds of comments across all of Google Workspace’s social channels.

Results that surpass industry standards

Google Workspace’s new content framework didn’t just succeed in helping deliver content that reached a Gen Z audience, it crushed it.

By September of 2022, Workspace’s framework had already exceeded our end-of-year performance goals.

On TikTok, content created using the framework delivered an engagement rate of 14.88%, racking up 238.8K views and 7,250 engagements, and surpassing the industry standard by nearly 10%.

Continuous value

The real value of the framework we created for Google Workspace is its inherent adaptability.

By striking a balance between branded content and creator collaborations, Workspace’s social channels will be able to keep up with the latest cultural trends with content that doesn’t require in-house heavy lifting.

Helping Google Workspace stay top of the cultural pulse is keeping in line with our team’s history of work with Google. As our team’s partnership with Google continues, we’re ready and excited to see what’s next.