What is the best way to market a home improvement product and service online to a national audience?

For home services, Fridge Magnets are hands down the best marketing tool.

US average is every person in a household visits their fridge 13x times daily, so 13x * 365 days/year == 4745 impressions for <$5 one time fee to have magnet manufactured + mailed to homes.

Talk with people familiar with copy writing for magnets.

Once you get this system working, you'll likely put me on your Christmas list, because of all the marketing money you'll save.

This is interesting, right? Because your target audience may not necessarily be part of this tech wave and are on Amazon ordering stuff. These groups of people are "old school" in their purchase personality. They probably look into catalogs, read the mail that they receive, etc.

I would recommend:
1. Doing product placement in your local golf, hunting, fishing stores. Maybe do a 50% split with them.
2. Using mailers to send out. USPS has the option of you sending them brochures and they would drop it off in peoples' mailboxes - you get to choose the radius, etc.
3. The older demographic (elderly retired men) actually use FB the most as a social media platform. I would do a geo-targeted ad campaign on Facebook with the age range of >50 | Hobbies include: fishing, hunting, golfing. You can even add a criteria in Facebook ads to include peoples' interest in shows/movies/etc. I'm sure there are fishing shows that people watch so you can include that too. Then spend $100 a week on ads and A/B test them.
4. Partner up with local real estate agents somehow and see if you can work out some cross-marketing strategy - would be interesting to see.

Given that you have a very specific product, target audience, and list of locations, I'd recommend testing AdWords campaigns. Depending on what your product is, you'll likely be able to identify some niche keywords to bid on, and you can segment your campaigns by geography, allowing you to get really localized with your ad copy.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you'd like to discuss this further!

I would focus on building custom audiences natively on social media based on those 25 states, age, and either pages they follow or interests and behaviors with a simple and compelling call to action (email for more info, call, etc...)

We've had some great results with Facebook advertising. My business is publishing, but I've invested thousands of dollars and nearly 100 hours researching and practicing how to find the right audience on FB, so I think anyone can advertise there successfully. The best part of Facebook is the ability it provides advertisers to target anyone. You can target locations, age, male/female, income and, yes, even homeowners. We've had success using video views to narrow our audience and create hot prospects. Let me know if you have any questions.

I see 2 options:
- try to sell in the idea through his wife, try to convince that group, because if husbands spend much time on golf, fishing or hunting, their wives spend more time at home or on female gathering
- or, go with those people on hunting or golf, befriend with them and sell directly
all the best
Val

I'm throwing my 2 cents here because I see you've gotten some good advice and some not so good advice, to say the least.
Your target market is not really part of the Internet era and therefore less likely to search you out on the internet but they do use Google and Facebook.
My suggestion would be a combo of print marketing and very targeted Adwords and Facebook ad campaigns.
Also important to list all of your locations on Google so people can find them on Google maps.
For the kind of work you offer I recommend you use information marketing because you need to educate people on why they should buy this home improvement in the first place.
So you need something that will educate your leads and customers on a regular basis.
Hope this helps.

Yamil.

As a marketer, start-up enthusiast and home improvement veteran, I felt compelled to address this question. While it may appear to be a fairly straight forward marketing challenge, coming up with an efficient marketing strategy is far more complex of a challenge than it appears on the surface in your situation. I also wanted to build on some of the solid advice presented in the previous answers. My only caveats are that I can only go so far, given not knowing the exact nature of your product and why you specifically focused on the selected targets and the reasoning/research behind it.
Right out of the gate, there’s an obvious issue with age in your case. While appearing more homogeneous, your age range represents a highly diverse market in terms of specific “reach” requirements and individual factors. As seen across answers, part of your market will be at least reasonably if not highly sophisticated in terms of web and social media use and I highly agree that FB should be the main social promotional tool. I would also add mid to late 40’s to your targets until proven otherwise, which has its own marketing implication, but will likely groove with some of your 50’s consumers anyway.
Moreover, all of these target consumers will also have a high probability to conduct online information searches, as well as use “how to” and “review” sites and instructional/review videos. I won’t belabor you with repeating some of the basic tactics as noted by previous responders. At first, to get off the ground, the targeting and messaging can be simpler, but I will say that you’re probably going to need to gain a much deeper understanding of your targeting in far greater detail then the basic demo’s listed here, for the long run. This will be critical to determining the most effective/efficient messaging and unique selling propositions across online platforms.
Conversely and as noted in previous answers, you’ll have a large swath of consumers who are either limited web users or outright avoid the web like a plague. If you only go after online consumers, you’ll totally miss out on a lot of potential customers/revenue. Accordingly, you’ll need to utilize more old school marketing methods as well. Zip code-based direct mailers, brochures, and branded swag can be an effective tool, but beware that direct mailers with swag can get pricy, though can be effective. My concern would be to provide swag (i.e. magnets, pens, lights, etc.…) to highly targeted smaller lists (and A/B test) and focus on messaging based on some sort of repeat or WOM generating intentions. While difficult to answer perfectly, in simple terms, you’ll want swag that someone in your target market would actually use/keep. For example, magnets can be an awesome tool, but a big waste if they don’t make it to the fridge; there has to be a synergy/coherence or some other hook.
What I would add is to consider regional or national local affiliate marketing through TV and/or radio. My guess is a good portion of your targets will listen to their favorite AM station or oldies FM. Local TV spots during the noon or evening news could be highly cost effective, but can be pricy in terms of absolute costs/resources. I like the previous advisor’s idea about using local retailers, but be aware that it can be tricky with 3-way promotional relationships and, the goals and benefits must be aligned and common/agreed upon by you, the manufacturer and each given retailer. There also might be conflict between direct and indirect retail competition. I would also combine the best of both worlds in perhaps arranging a deal with online retailers as well.
Although you didn’t ask about these issues, I wanted to offer a few more pieces of advice. First as alluded to in my earlier answers, you will need to go into greater detail as far as targeting variables and selecting the best sub-target markets go. This will be vital to discerning the best promo methods, messaging, tactics and so forth based on profiles and associated consumer behaviors. For example, consider the very wide range of potential consumers and behaviors just associated with golf; there are wide variations in demographics, education, lifestyle, socioeconomic, geographic & cultural factors, which may lead to very different promotional methods and media. Similarly, consumers that play golf, hunt, and fish may be significantly different in terms of wants/needs/behavior as compared to those that just hunt and/or fish.
These same issues go for just using basic variables such as age or gender; I bet you that we could come up with dozens of other variables to consider. Also, it could be a mistake to ignore women as well, given their potential earning status in a given home and increasing uptake of traditional male interests and activities. I’d also figure out the difference between “those too busy to mess with home improvements” versus those that are just flat out incapable thereof (an ever-rising male trait) as the important messaging factors and calls to action could be different to best “speak to” each group.
Finally, I’d would be very thoughtful in terms of business/marketing relationships with the manufacturer and handing potential competition from people like yourself. Developing strong relationships and legal/contractual arrangements will be a must, though not a guarantee. Granted, many a manufacturer will be happy to have marketing outlets like yourself but given that they typically will have more resources (i.e. financial, technical, CRM, contractors, etc.…) they may use you as a pick, to use the auto racing vernacular. They might let you take all the risks or find out what works best and then simply bring those operations in-house and at total scale. They may agree to national territories at first, but other contractors may stand out in particular regions and have their own clout and won’t want to share with you, nor the manufacturer want to lose them as a channel outlet.
I hope this gives you some good ideas about some of the basics that will need to be properly addressed and of course I’m here if you need further professional help. Good luck!

Offer the product or service for free to one person. Run an online campaign and ask people to sign up with their emails and phone numbers. If your product or service is good, per lead should cost between $1-$3. You can bring the cost down to 60-70 cents if your online campaign is brilliant. Now collect 200,300 or 1000 thousand emails and phone numbers based on your budget.
Then choose a winner and let every participant know that someone has really won.
Then start your email campaign. Because of the nature of the campaign, you know that all of these people really desire a product or service like the one you offer. All they need is a little push and reminders to make the purchase.
1. Send them more information about the product. Try to focus on the problem it solves. Your product sounds like a robot vacuum. Tell them how troublesome it is to vacuum a large house. How much time silly chores take away from life (in your case, from golfing, hunting, fishing etc.)
2. Keep a track of how many are you converting with each new communication.
3. Follow up buyers with service information and new offers so that they refer your products to family and friends.
4. People who have not yet bought, hit them with more and more useful information about the problem your product solves.
Try this and thank me later :)