Marketers have long been challenged to ‘do more with less’, but 2012 is bringing good news for marketers and their budgets: Forrester Research reports that B2B marketing budgets are increasing by 6.8% on average. High tech companies are leading this trend with a 9% budget increase in 2012 (although, interestingly, their budgets increased MORE last year at 17% growth). Manufacturing firms take the second position with a 7% increase this year as they invest in more digital channels.

Pharma, medical devices and biotech saw the greatest change this year, with a 2% increase in budgets compared to 3% in budget cuts across the industry in 2011.

The report also notes that across ALL industries, 27% of marketers will expand their budgets between 10% and 19% this year. By comparison, only 19% of the 864 marketing executives surveyed said they expected a budget decrease, the remaining 81% expected to see an increase of some kind.

So what does this mean for marketers? Hopefully, this trend will continue over the next few years, with marketers investing in new technologies, techniques and marketing channels. Success in these new endeavors should perpetuate some of these budget increases, thanks to the high ROI digital and interactive marketing platforms can provide when well executed. On which marketing tools would you spend your increased budget?