The latest marketing tracking poll conducted by Royal Mail and the Marketing Society has revealed how the UK’s top 100 marketing directors plan to spend their budgets over the next six months. The survey shows that 33% of marketers are optimistically predicting an increase in marketing budgets for the rest of 2010, while only 13% expects their budgets to be cut; 54% estimated that it would stay the same.

Talking about their marketing budgets, 43% of directors said that they would focus on attracting new customers; this is a considerable increase from six months ago that saw only 28% of marketers directing their budgets at new customers.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was sighted as the most important marketing medium from respondents with 45%, with social media a close second with 42%. Other marketing media plans included word of mouth with 37% of the vote and a surprising 27% said that direct mail would be main channel for their marketing over the next few months.

Other key figures of the study found that 19% of marketers would be focusing on retaining their existing customers, while 15% of respondents sighted brand building and brand awareness as their main goal. Publishing, radio and cinema were regarded as the least important marketing channels with 8.5%, 6% and 1.4% respectively.