As a Facebook marketer, I always talk about how impactful Facebook ads can be for growing your business. The reason is 2.3 billion  people and counting are on Facebook every day. There’s an audience out there looking for your products! However Facebook is not magic, you are not going to see the best results if you don't have the basics covered first. 
Today let's talk about those basics so that you get a head start when you are ready for advertising.

1.First things first: If you are serious about investing money in Facebook ads, you need to have a decent budget. Think of this as an investment to buy data from Facebook. If you want to spend £50 here and there,or boost a post  for £5 a day, you’re not investing enough money for Facebook to feed it out and to learn from it.

2.Grow your Facebook & Instagram accounts to a decent size before starting to invest in ads. This is because, people will check out your social profiles when they come across your ads. If you only have a handful of likes on your Facebook page, they won't be able to understand whether or not you are a credible company that they can trust. Once you have a decent size of around 300 people then it's time to venture into paid social.

3. I cannot stress the importance of having an active Facebook and Instagram page. Your organic content is still very important. If you have an engaged audience, Facebook will reward your ad experience and overall your costs will decrease. 

4. Make sure you set up the Facebook pixel on your website. The pixel tracks every visit to your website. Even if you don’t have the budget or audience to start ads right now, you can start collecting valuable data.

5. How is your website? Is it optimised for mobile? Does it upload quickly? You need to  be able to offer a smooth checkout process to customers. If you don't have that, even if your ads direct people to your website, people will not take the actions you want them to. If the website is slow, or if checking out is difficult (ie you ask people to create a profile), delivery costs are too high, then people will bounce off and buy from someone else.

6. Know your audience : Facebook offers very granular targeting. For example, you can target people based on their demographics, interests, languages and location. You can target people who visited your website, who follow you on Facebook and Instagram and you can create custom audiences and upload your email list. 

7. Are you able to cope with the increased demand that will come with the ads? Do you have systems or teams to deal with the increased demand? If not, then it doesn't makes sense for you to grow the business just yet. Make sure you have the capacity to scale before investing in advertising.

Facebook advertising can make an impact putting your offer in front of the right audience and it can make this impact much faster than other marketing methods. However you need to have the foundations in place first.