Getting a new kind of financial support noticed

The situation

A new service was launching in Belgium to help people with limited financial and digital literacy actually access the support (benefits, guidance, tools) they were already entitled to. The target audience wasn't the hard part; reaching them credibly was. People in this position don't respond well to a typical marketing pitch, and the organizations that could vouch for the service, banks and public institutions, had their own reputations to protect.

That created a genuine chicken-and-egg problem: the public would trust the service more if an institution backed it, and institutions would back it more easily once it had visible public traction. Somebody had to move first, and moving first without either kind of trust already in place is exactly how well-intentioned public-benefit services quietly fail to reach the people they were built for.

There was also a language and framing problem underneath the trust problem. A lot of the existing material in this space, well-meaning as it is, is written the way institutions talk to each other: correct, thorough, and completely unreadable to someone who's stressed about money and doesn't have an hour to parse a benefits eligibility page. Fixing that meant starting further back than a normal go-to-market brief, closer to "how does this audience actually process information under stress" than "what channels do we run."

The approach

I built the go-to-market strategy around two audiences that needed two different kinds of trust, worked in a specific order:

1. 1

   The institutional case, first. Positioned the service as a credible, low-risk partner, not a fintech asking a bank to take a reputational bet, but a service that made the institution look good for referring people to it. That framing had to come before any public-facing push existed for institutions to react to.

2. 2

   Public awareness through channels already trusted. Rather than a from-scratch brand-awareness campaign, the public-facing plan worked through the same institutions and public bodies once they were on board, so the first time most people heard about the service, it was already vouched for by a source they already trusted, not a cold ad.

3. 3

   Messaging built for the actual audience. Copy and creative written for people who don't respond to typical marketing urgency or jargon: plain language, concrete next steps, no pressure tactics that would read as exactly the kind of pitch this audience has learned to distrust. Every piece of copy was tested against one question: would this make sense to someone reading it once, quickly, on a phone, while distracted?

4. 4

   A rollout sequence, not a single launch date. Because the strategy depended on institutional trust existing before public awareness, the actual rollout had to be staged deliberately, region by region and partner by partner, rather than a single national launch that would have outrun the institutional groundwork.

The throughline across all four pieces was the same: credibility has to be earned in a specific order for an audience like this, and shortcutting that order (loud public launch first, hoping institutions follow) almost always backfires for services in this space.

Where it stands

Client name is kept out of this write-up at their request. What's above is the actual strategy built and executed for this launch, not a placeholder waiting on numbers to fill in later, and I'm happy to go deeper on any part of it, the sequencing, the institutional positioning, the copy testing, on a call.