Give Content the “Silent” Power of Repeated Sound

From nursery rhymes to content marketing, alliteration packs a punch — word power punch. From Peter Piper’s pickled peppers to the title of the novel The Great Gatsby, a series of words, each beginning with the same consonant sound,  tends to stick in readers’ memory…

“Alliteration is one of the most beloved tools in a writer’s figurative language toolkit,” Millie Dinsdale, content manager for Fictionay.co, calls alliteration “one of the most beloved tools in a writer’s figurative language toolkit,” enhancing the musicality of a phrase or sentence and amplifying its effect.

Alliterative headlines, because they’re memorable and engaging, can enhance SEO, increasing clickthrough rates, digital strategist Deepanjana ChakrabortyI observes on Linked In. However, she cautions, while a travel blog might use a title like “Marvelous Mediterranean Moments” to arouse interest, creativity must be balanced with relevance so that the headline accurately reflects the content of the blog post or article.

Alliterative company names like Best Buy, PayPal, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Coca Cola stick in our minds, conjuring up images of their logos, Lindsay Kramer observes in grammarly.com.  The effect of alliteration is heard, rather than read, she explains –even if the reader only “hears” it in their mind as they read silently. In everyday speech, alliteration is quite common, she points out – think “quick question”, “pizza party”, and “big business”.

Something I’ve been teaching for years now at Say It For You is using both consonant and vowel repetition with an eye to making blog post titles more “catchy”. After all, I remind content marketers, it’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it. A couple of weeks ago, at a networking meeting, I was reminded that alliteration can have multiple applications as we create content. In introducing his work to the group, a financial planner cited five “triggering events”, instances when financial decisions assume enormous urgency and importance:

• Death
• Divorce
• Disability
• Departure
• Disagreement

Elaborating on each of these five Ds lent structure to his presentation and helped it “stick in our minds” (it’s obvious the “Ds” stuck in mine!).

Give content the “silent” power of repeated sound!