After several years of cuts, B2B marketing leaders are increasing their budgets by 6.7% in the technology sector, according to the latest Forrester Research report.

Technology companies plan to increase their marketing budgets by 17% on average for this year, and other sectors that plan a remarkable growth are:

• Finance and insurance 7.8%
• High technology products 5.9%
• Business and professional services 4.3%
• Manufactures 4.3%

On the contrary, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers plan to reduce their expenses by 2.8%, compared to their 2010 budgets. Among other findings, we can see in the report that the three major areas of B2B investment for this 2011 is the commercialization and management of products (21.3%), the generation of lead (15.7%) and the brand (13.5%).

B2B brands will continue to move gradually towards new priorities to improve and this follows that:

• The community and interactive marketing are expected to represent 7.4% of 2011 budgets
• The promotion of lead is expected to be 7.2% of expenditure, increasing to 0.8 points compared to the previous year.