Companies are shifting their focus from survival to expansion. In order to generate new sales leads, they may begin to increase budgets for bulk mailing and other direct marketing strategies, a study from BtoB magazine suggests. 

The "2012 Outlook: Marketing Priorities & Plans" survey revealed that in addition to heightened spending in online media, budgets for telemarketing are expected to increase 18 percent, events by 41 percent and direct mail by 36 percent. Survey respondents indicated that they would make slight cuts to print advertising.

Nicola Morris, Verizon Business' vice president of marketing and strategy, told BtoB that marketers would have to become more creative in how they target consumers in a world with "borderless interactions and transactions."

List management and multichannel marketing tactics may also become more popular this year, the vice president of brand and marketing at American Express OPEN, Julie Fajgenbaum, told the magazine.

"The first thing is to warm our current leads through social communities so that later we'll try to sell them the AmEx Gold Card when they're more receptive to a sales pitch," she said. "A second effort we'll make this year is to figure out how to warm up the hundreds of thousands of entirely cold leads we have."