When it comes to the commercial real estate sector, the fine-grained details matter.

For that reason, an email blast announcing a property and its estimated parking spaces per 1,000 square feet — along with a deluge of other measurements, locations and timetables — might pass for an adequate, albeit unimaginative marketing approach.

But there are a number of local marketing firms now deepening their commitments to this industry. And they’re busy livening up messages that have only narrowly escaped email spam filters. 

Splendor Design Group is one of them. Over the past several years, the firm has taken a keen interest in this sector. And it has taken an approach to marketing in this arena that takes a storytelling spin over bullet-pointed details to make an impact in an age of inbox inundation. The goal is to take what should be an exciting sector — one sculpting the business landscape throughout the Garden State — and make its marketing efforts exciting, too.

Even when it’s necessary to lay bare the specifics, the firm’s founder and creative director, Adam Taylor, said the industry is learning to be more playful. As an example: Taylor said he’s guilty of bringing emojis into the email subject line of emails about commercial real estate developments.

“Just something small like that can stand out as unorthodox for a fairly conservative, buttoned-up kind of an industry as a whole,” he said. “But it’s important to catch people in the daily scrolls and clicks and make more of an impact.”

The fact is, Taylor said, the industry is at a point of heightened competitiveness. There are many properties being developed and leased in the New Jersey backyard today — ramping up competition between companies for the precious real estate of someone’s inbox.

There’s also a lot of competition now among marketing firms that see this industry as the place to be.

“And it’s tough because it’s not like mom-and-pop businesses where there’s 100 in every small town — there’s a finite amount of ideal targets,” Taylor said. “On top of that, the companies doing commercial real estate have often been doing it for a long time, so they have an established brand and reputation already.”

But, even if a firm in the commercial real estate industry has everything in the brand department covered, a lot of longstanding firms are looking for help retooling messaging to court millennials and their employers.

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