When I led content for the customer service vertical at Aircall, backlinks weren’t my primary KPI.
But I knew that creating decidedly human content could attract meaningful attention, not just from prospects, but from people.
What I didn’t know was that this simple approach would lead to Aircall’s first organic backlinks from respected SaaS brands like Outreach and Klaus—without PR help, paid placements, or cold outreach.
In this post, I’ll break down what happened and what content marketers (especially on small or scrappy teams) can take from it.
The formation of a strategy 🪄
As a member of a three-person content team nestled within demand gen, my mandate was to write content for customer support leaders that focused on real pain points, ideally in a way that compelled them to engage more deeply with the brand.
After writing an ebook and launching a blog newsletter, I’d managed to build a respectable list of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), but I’d also begun to think more critically about how I approached the blog in service of the newsletter.
What’s inbox-worthy? And how can I write that?
Given the freedom to focus less on MQLs one quarter, I saw an opportunity to act more intentionally with content. Instead of generating ideas strictly around addressing pain points, I wanted to brainstorm around making an impression.
To do that, I kept two guiding principles about what each piece of content should have the potential to achieve in mind:
- Differentiate the brand from competitors
- Help shape a stronger, more recognizable identity
I wanted to position Aircall as a trusted and reliable resource for customer service content by creating work that would stand out and stick with people.
My manager loved it. She dubbed it our social-first strategy and made referral traffic our north star.
The humble execution 🔨
I immediately began drafting ideas that would enable us to tell relevant and memorable stories.
We had to scrap the first one, so I pitched another that was equally compelling: a list of not-so-secret challenges customer support reps experience on the job, aimed at increasing empathy among their managers.
When the article was 80% done, I shared a short bulleted list with the Support Driven Slack channel for a pulse check. They loved it.
Feeling confident, I hit publish, queued the LinkedIn post, and imagined the traffic rolling in.
The reaction was quieter than I imagined, but the metrics showed promise: The referral traffic was decent, the likes were higher than usual, and we even got a few comments.
It wasn’t viral, but it wasn’t a total flop either. And as I examined the metrics more closely, I realized—through their time-on-page—that people were reading the entire article.
It was exciting, and as I began exploring new ideas, I was determined to follow up in ways that showed progressive improvement over time.
Then COVID happened.
Through apparent failure, success ⭐
Like most companies, we had to shift our priorities once COVID hit. Brand building was out, and highly targeted, industry-niche SEO articles were in.
But as the weeks passed, something interesting happened: A business psychologist in the UK shared the article on LinkedIn.
Then a technical support agent commented on a LinkedIn post for an entirely different article in a way that made it clear he didn’t just skim it—he’d read it, enjoyed it, and thought about it.
These engagements may not seem huge on the surface, but they were unusual. Our content posts were rarely engaged with, let alone shared by people outside the company.
The shift made me curious.
So I looked at Google Analytics—and I realized that no longer working the strategy didn’t mean the strategy stopped working.
Within a few months of going live, the first and only article written under the social-first strategy had earned an organic backlink from customer support quality assurance platform, Klaus (now Zendesk).
When I checked their content curation site, supportreads.com (now defunct), I realized two articles I’d previously written were also listed.
The first article was How to Unlock Creativity in Customer Service.
The second was 5 Career Building Roles for Customer Service Reps—the same article the technical support agent commented on the month before.
Klaus wasn’t the only brand that took notice of those articles. Content management platform, Storychief.io, also included the creativity post in its daily newsletter of handpicked content for entrepreneurs, ranking my post as the #1 article in customer success.
We beat Intercom that day.
It didn’t stop there. Popular sales solution Outreach also included the creativity post in a roundup blog alongside well-known content marketers like Devin Reed.
In the end, I’d earned a total of six organic backlinks from three articles:
- Klaus: 1 roundup blog mention
- Storychief.io: 1 newsletter inclusion
- Outreach: 1 roundup blog mention
- Supportreads: 3 curated listings
It was massively validating, and while it’s tempting to pretend I had this all figured out from the start, I didn’t.
The 5 Things article was the only one I’d written for the express purpose of referral traffic.
The other two were part of an article series I’d turned into an ebook to capture leads.
So what happened here?
Why these articles earned backlinks 🔗
I didn’t set out to run a link-building campaign. I set out to do what all content marketers yearn to achieve: create useful, relevant content that people care about.
These words are thrown around so much in marketing circles they can become meaningless, so let’s take a more incisive approach to understanding what made these articles work so well that several brands linked to us.
They connect seemingly unrelated concepts
I was inspired to write the creativity post because I’d written about driving organizational creativity before. It occurred to me that we often think of creativity in terms of people who make art and artifacts, like writers, designers, and musicians.
In truth, creativity is about problem-solving, and customer support reps solve problems all day.
By combining something we associate with fun (creation) with something we consider procedural and “unfun” (customer service), I created a sense of intrigue and novelty around an oversaturated topic plagued by generic and repetitive advice.
They speak the unspeakable
Observing how often people at work strive to mask their disappointments led me to 5 Things Support Reps Wish They Could Tell Their Managers. I wanted to serve as a voice for those unspoken truths—not to provoke, but to promote improved relationships built on shared understanding.
By applying a positive focus to underlying, seldom-expressed truths, I brought the lived experience of customer support reps to the forefront, inviting managers to show empathy through action.
Don’t take my word for it—Klaus shared exactly why they placed the article at the top of their “best in CX” list:
This article by Dania McDermott, published in the Aircall blog, feels like a good breath of fresh air as it tackles one of the topics that nobody else wants to talk about. Honestly and abruptly, here’s what customer service agents wish they could share with their managers.
We love how Dania brings these topics into the sunlight and accompanies them with actual solutions so that you can try them out right away.”
In response to real tension, they craft a vision of joyous expansion
As a way to build on How to Unlock Creativity in Customer Service, I decided to provide support managers with an image of the potential future for some of their reps as the organization grows.
The result was 5 Career Building Roles for Customer Support Reps, an article that takes the idea of “speaking the unspeakable” a step further by shifting the focus from short-term emotional catharsis to long-term tangible possibility.
By naming the tension (customer support can feel like a dead-end job) while providing a credible roadmap for upward mobility (career-advancing pathways), the article sparks awareness and hope, urging managers to leverage ambition to inspire loyalty.
What content marketers (including me) can take from this 🤔
If there’s one thing these backlink-yielding articles have in common, it’s emotional resonance.
I knew how it felt to be a support rep, and that proximity gave me the insight needed to write pieces that stood out and stuck with people—and the brands that eventually linked to us.
Clearly, emotional truth has value.
But what happens when we don’t have that connection to the audience? As content marketers, how can we convey emotional truth when something falls outside our experience?
In a follow-up post, I’ll explore the process of cultivating emotional resonance, especially when writing without authority.
