More than half--56%--of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year, Junta42 found after surveying its community of corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals.

What's more, a full 31% expressed their intention to increase spending on content significantly, while 25% said they planned to increase it slightly.

Even in the face of dramatic cutbacks and decreased budgets, only 4% of respondents said they planned to decrease spending on content dramatically next year, while 9% said they planned to decrease it slightly.

"These findings are an acceleration of what we've been seeing for the past few years," said Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42 and author of "Get Content. Get Customers."

Notably, surveyed marketers were very clear that social media will be at the top of their investment list next year.

In terms of most important products/tactics, social media--other than blogs--resonated with 68% of subscribers, followed by e-newsletters/email (60%), blogs (56%), case studies (55%), online video (51% ), white papers (46%) and microsites (43%).

"If marketers will spend less in 2009, it won't be coming from their content development budgets," Pulizzi said. "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers."

The Junta42 community is made up of both corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals. For the study, 42% were corporate marketers, 22% were traditional publishers/media, 19% were marketing/advertising agencies, 15% were custom publishers and 3% were association marketers.

In addition, 85% of the surveyed audience makes marketing purchase decisions for their organizations.

The Junta42 email study was delivered during the first week of December. A total of 1706 subscribers were invited to take the study, of which 196 completed the survey.

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