This is a very common question amongst small businesses. When ad budgets are small, and social media seems to so big, how do you find the right people with your modest budget?
That said, there is a disarmingly simple answer here; you want your ads to be seen by people who buy in your category.
So, if you sell bicycles, then you want your ads to be seen by anyone who buys bicycles. If you sell crochet patterns, then you want your ads to be seen by anyone who buys crochet patterns. Don’t worry that this can often be a very broad audience; that is very often the right answer.
Increasingly, the social media platforms are offering automated targeting whereby they know from your category what kind of audience they need to show the ads to. So, you can largely leave this task to them to work out for you.
Beware some of the hype around what is called ‘precision targetting’. The social media platforms offer some very detailed ways in which you can manually narrow down your audience based on various dimensions eg age, gender, hobbies, interest. This is often portrayed as being somehow more ‘precise’ or more ‘efficient’ but there is a danger that it unnecessarily excludes people who could buy from you. (It also assumes that the data that Meta has about people is accurate.)