Advertising on Facebook introduces your business to a potential audience of billions. While your advertisement will not be shown to every person with a Facebook account, it is important to tap into the relevant part of this audience. To do so, you need to create a business page and understand Facebook Ad’s customization options. However, these options can be overwhelming for the same reason they are so useful: there’s so many.

Before you get started with Facebook Advertising, you need to make a Facebook page for your business. This serves an entirely different purpose than your personal page. On your personal page, you share cute photos of your kids and random thoughts that you want to share with the world. It’s not recommended that you approach your business page this way.

Make sure your business page has a purpose. Also, decide what voice it will have and if that voice makes sense. The general population has a preconceived notion of the image each type of business is supposed to project. Keep in mind, no one wants to see a lawyer sharing the latest cat memes.

Your business page is important because it plays a key role in your Facebook advertising campaigns. Every post will link back to this page. You can add an additional link, which should be your website, and a photo or preview of the webpage you’re linking to. The information contained in your Facebook ads should be on-brand and needs to be relevant to those who are seeing it.

In your Facebook Ads dashboard, you need to decide what type of ad campaign you would like to run. This is just a fancy way of asking, “Do you want to increase brand awareness, get people through the door, or something else?”

Once you’ve decided, now it’s time to think about who would be interested in this ad and who you want to target. For example, a sports memorabilia store would probably want to target men 18-55, who have a demonstrated interest in a specific sport or specific teams. Let’s say this store is in New Jersey. Even with a website, the owner should target people who live in New Jersey; in this case, male adult sports fans. However, he may find this demographic to be too broad because it’s baseball season and a bunch of New York Yankee and New York Mets jerseys were delivered. The owner of this fictional sports memorabilia store can use Facebook ads to target baseball fans in New Jersey, specifically fans of the previously mentioned teams.

Regardless of your business type and business goals, Facebook pages and ads work the same way. You populate the information into Facebook, design your ad, and decide how much you are willing to pay per person who sees or clicks on the ad.