Automation has gained popularity among advertisers, as it removes steps from manual and tedious processes in the creation and targeting of ads, from search to display and video. Yet 73% of respondents participating in a study released Tuesday said social media advertising creation and delivery still involves time-consuming manual processes. That’s up from 72% in 2020.

Smartly.io, a social advertising automation platform for creative and performance marketers, with help from the WBR Insights research team, in November 2021 surveyed 100 business leaders across North America at B2C companies in ecommerce, CPG, retail, gaming, travel, and financial services.

The manual processes used span from strategy formation to content creation and posting, managing and aligning content to specific campaigns. Some 69% — down from 81% in the prior year — said they do not use automation technology for social media advertising creation.

Only 17% of those using automation technology say they are using it successfully.

In 2022, advertisers plan to:

– Use more creative automation (31%, up from 13% in the prior year)
– Expand their in-house marketing teams to better manage social media advertising (29%)
– Outsource social media advertising more (29%)
– Invest more in social media advertising tools and tech (26%)

The research released today analyzes how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact ad spending on social media in 2022. Smartly.io’s third annual State of Social Advertising Report surveyed 100 leaders across the ecommerce, retail, gaming, travel and financial services industries.

Consumers use on average eight social media platforms, making a multiplatform advertising and marketing approach essential.

Some 51% of respondents say at least half of their overall marketing budgets go toward social media advertising spread across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and others.

Not surprisingly, Facebook still takes the majority of spend — with 98% of advertisers saying they buy ads to run on its platform. Some 94% of advertisers use Instagram — up from 90% last year, while 88% use YouTube.

TikTok rose to 43% this year, up from 34% in 2021.

Return on advertising spend (ROAS) drives shifting ad-spend allocations In 2022, with many companies planning to increase advertising budgets across social platforms, even more than they did last year. While Facebook is still a leader for many brands, with 87% of respondents saying they will increase ad spend there, Instagram saw the biggest year-over-year jump – from 38% to 73%.

Some 18% said they will increase spend on TikTok, up 8% from the prior year. ROAS continues to drive a shift in how marketers choose to allocate ad budgets on social media.

For the second year in a row, Instagram has emerged the winner when it comes to seeing the best ROAS from social ads–46%, up 4% from last year. The more ROAS, the more marketers increase budgets on social media.

Although automation has gained popularity for ad creation and targeting, 73% of B2C business leaders in a survey said social media ad creation and delivery still involves time-consuming manual processes — up from 72% in 2020.