To Create Marketing Plan for

Amazon Web Services

Prepared by: Presented to:
Mr. Mukund Prasad
Prashant
Senthilarasu D049
Ezhil Rajasundar F047
Rohit R B047
Vatsala Krishna B036
Abhishek Chaku B018
Gulshan Mishra A039
Aiyush Bahl E008

School of Business Management NMIMS, Mumba

On 11th Nov, 2020
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT................................................................................................................3
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY...............................................................................................................4
MARKET ANALYSIS.....................................................................................................................6
COMPANY ANALYSIS................................................................................................................10
OBJECTIVES...............................................................................................................................18
SEGMENTATION AND TARGETING (STP)..................................................................................23
MARKETING STRATEGY............................................................................................................24
REFERENCES.............................................................................................................................26
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to express our special thanks of gratitude to Dr Mukund Prasad, Faculty of
Marketing of IT Products and Services as well as School of Business Management, NMIMS
Mumbai who gave us the golden opportunity to do this project on the creating marketing
strategy for Amazon Web Services, Cloud Solutions, which helped our understanding on
how marketing of cloud solution works and helped us to understand what goes into
marketing of IT products and services.
Secondly, we would also like to thank everyone who helped us to complete the project and
deliver it on time.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Amazon's use of a decentralised IT infrastructure has a long history. This structure has
allowed our development teams to leverage on-demand computing and storage services,
and has improved overall flexibility and agility. By 2005, over a decade and millions of
dollars, Amazon had invested constructing and maintaining the large-scale, stable and
productive IT infrastructure that powered one of the largest online shopping sites in the
world. Amazon implemented Amazon Web Services (AWS) so that other companies could
benefit from the expertise and investment of Amazon in operating a distributed,
transactional IT platform on a wide scale. Since 2006, AWS has been running and now
represents hundreds of thousands of clients worldwide.
Today, Amazon.com runs a worldwide web site servicing millions of consumers annually and
handling exchange worth billions of dollars. You can order processing resources, storage,
and other facilities in minutes using AWS and have the freedom to choose the platform or
programming for development.
In the conventional IT computing landscape, AWS is readily separated from other providers
because it is:
Flexible: AWS helps companies to use their already familiar programming structures,
operating systems, databases, and architectures. Furthermore, this versatility allows
companies to mix and match architectures to suit their different business needs.
Cost-effective: For AWS, without up-front or long-term obligations, companies pay only for
what they need.
Scalable and elastic: In order to satisfy consumer demand and manage costs, companies
can dynamically add and deduct AWS services to their applications.
Secure: AWS builds systems in compliance with security best practises in order to provide
end-to - end security and end-to - end privacy, offers the necessary security features in
those services, and records how to use those features.
Experienced: Companies will exploit Amazon's more than fifteen years of experience in the
efficient, stable distribution of large-scale, multinational networks by using AWS.
Marketing Mix:

Product: IT office products and services that solves customers computing problems cloud
and related data bases.
Price: as it is a B2B business so its prices are variable. The different types of pricing options
available are:
 Per Hour Bidding
 Region Specific Pricing
 Low prices using spot bidding prices
 Savings with reserved instances
Place: The place is mainly online as the product is virtual. The services are provided
remotely through Amazon’s own channel.
Promotions: it uses plethora of promotional tactics such as blogs, advertisements, featuring
in seminars and workshops, providing trial-based services and much more.

In this report we understood the core business and functionality of AWS. We studied the
market and major competitors of AWS along with studying its customers buying behaviour.
Redefined objectives for the company financial as well as non-financial. Then we segmented
the market on the basis of several parameters and targeted according to AWS's business.
We devised a marketing strategy for the company with stated value proposition. The report
also consists of the various products and services that Amazon Web Services provides. It
also includes the way it brands its products and markets to its potential customers. The
project also entails a well-defined marketing and promotional strategy. Then we take a look
at the distribution strategy of Amazon Web Services.
MARKET ANALYSIS

The Cloud computing is the future of technology. It is easy to agree based on the data
released by Statista, the expected CAGR is 29.2% between 2021-2026. The Industry size of
cloud is about $180 billion, the CAGR is 25-30% between 2014-2018 with close to 30+
players in the market and close to 5 players in the industry. An industry that is anticipated
by Gartner to keep on taking off – toward the finish of 2018 worldwide cloud income
represented USD$196.7 billion, toward the finish of 2019, it represented USD$227.8 billion,
is relied upon to arrive at USD$266.4 billion out of 2020, and USD$354.6 billion out of 2022.
Up 17% since a year ago and seeing a 37% generally development year-over-year, toward
the beginning of 2020, the top chiefs inside the cloud business reported their best quarter.
Recording memorable numbers, going from millions to billions in all cases, these pinnacles
interested specialists around the globe and left everybody considering what is the following
cloud development achievement.

Competitors in the Market: Cloud

The big players in the cloud market are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft
Azure, Alibaba cloud, IBM Cloud. The market share of these players is,

 Amazon – 33%
 Microsoft – 18%
 Google Cloud – 9%
 Other local players – 40%

Collaborators:

Amazon Web Services Partners: Technical

Amazon Web Services Partners: Business

Major services in the cloud are,

a) Compute
b) Storage
c) Data Management
d) Migration
e) Networking & Content delivery
f) Development tools and Application services
g) Management and Monitoring
h) Security, Identity and Compliance
i) Analytics
j) Artificial Intelligence & IOT
k) Mobile development
l) Notifications
m) Business productivity
 Market Share of the Cloud Services in the Globe

Product Types available in the market are,

 Virtual Machine Services,

 Simple Storage System,
 RDBMS,

Biggest Client of the Cloud Services are,

a) Netflix - $19 million

b) LinkedIn - $13 million
c) Facebook - $11 million
d) BBC - $9 million
e) Baidu - $9 million
f) ESPN - $8 million

Growth Factors of Cloud Services

a) Marginality and Scalability

b) Network Effect
c) Demand of Remote desktops
d) Start-up ecosystem
e) Increased Data Consumption
Distribution

Divided into the number of global regions and each region has the multiple availability
zones, allow users to set geographical limit on their services.

COMPANY ANALYSIS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first to offer public IaaS, as far back as 2006. Since
they've been doing this the longest, it shouldn't be astounding that one of Amazon's key
qualities is the development of its IaaS contributions and the whole AWS environment
besides. AWS has a nearly overpowering measure of various administrations accessible,
from DNS directing to reserving to stack balancers: practically anything you would require
out of the cloud, AWS can convey. Also, AWS has the most server farms of any IaaS supplier,
which implies they have the most extensive worldwide inclusion and the most vigorous,
dependable organization. These two key qualities are regularly the fundamental attract to
AWS for some clients: its nearly ensured that you can do what you have to do on AWS,
regardless of how dark, and it will offer reasonable dependability for even the most touchy
applications.
 Amazon Growth Rate in Comparison with US Ecommerce Growth Rate

The development of the AWS system has, amusingly, demonstrated to be a con to a few, as
the enormous number of alternatives clients are introduced after beginning their first
example can be a touch of overpowering. The AWS climate is so huge; indeed, numerous
organizations find representatives may require zeroed in preparing on the AWS system
before they're ready to appropriately oversee AWS administrations. This abundance of
choices can likewise imply that getting an undertaking going on AWS may require a smidgen
more set up work than it would on different suppliers, which will in general offer more
smoothed 'out of the case' choices. Moreover, a few people have called AWS' centre
explicitly around the public cloud, a shortcoming. AWS doesn't have a particular "crossbreed
cloud" arrangement (other than their GovCloud arrangements, which are basically centred
around the necessities of public area customers).

Tangible Assets

a) Perimeter Layer
b) Infrastructure layer
c) Data Layer
d) Environmental Layer
e) Systems and Devices
Since half and half cloud structures are the prevailing models for most enormous ventures,
numerous bigger organizations have been compelled to look to different merchants like
Microsoft which better location that need. Now and again, the requirement for a genuine
mixture cloud arrangement can be undermined by utilizing an answer like AWS Storage
Gateway, which empowers organizations to consistently expand their on-premises
information stockpiling into the cloud.

What is Amazon’s USP?

OBJECTIVES

Financial:

 Revenue, Margins, and Growth rate:

 Amazon Web Services leads the market for remote delivery of computing
power and data storage for third-party applications.
 It has become a major component of the digital supply chain for online
services along with companies outside the technology industry

Few past trends:

 In 2020, Amazon's third quarter revenue grew 37% to reach $96.1 billion with
Amazon Web Services sales at $11.6 billion
 Also, in 2020, AWS delivered third quarter operating income of $3.53 billion
  For the past five years AWS grew faster than Amazon’s other segments and
given Amazon the majority of its operating profit
Based on the promotion activities and marketing plan recommended, we came up with
following revenue projections:
 Revenue growth rate: 25-30%
 We have maintained a conservative approach towards the revenue growth
because of the unfavorable conditions for the businesses given the present
scenario due to which companies are reluctant to subscribe to different plans
As per the latest statistics and reports published by BCG and Gartner:
 The slowing growth will not be unique to AWS. Microsoft, which is AWS’
closest competitor, revenue growth from the Azure public cloud will be
slowed by 47%
 Furthermore, Google parent Alphabet, including G Suite productivity
software subscriptions, will be projecting revenue growth down by 52%
 Moreover, we be also lowering the cost of AWS EC2 computing instances for
customers that commit to usage over a set period of time which will further
boost our revenue streams and instill confidence in our ongoing customers
Non-financial:

 Customer satisfaction:
 For enhancing customer satisfaction, we will leverage the feedback from
current users of AWS who generally find the services easy to use, secure, and
cost-effective
 Keeping in line with the promotions, we will reach out to our customers
recommending the services to others as majority of them are very satisfied
with all three service areas: computing, storage, and databases

 Perceived quality:
 Our focus has always been on personalization while providing services to
accommodate multiple customers under our umbrella
 We will continue to leverage this notion and further make use of machine
learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to automate and accelerate the
processes to deliver real-time analytics and recommendations based on user
demographics.
 This type of solution will bring in the right balance of accurate data and
technology to generate better customer personalization results
  Loyalty:
 Amazon Web Services has been around for 10 years, and it has gobbled up a
huge portion of the public cloud market
 As per the Intermedia study, survey of 300 organizations found that 100
percent of respondents who tried AWS decided to stick with it and only 2
percent who hadn't tried it yet declared that they would "never use" it under
any circumstances
 To further strengthen the loyalty base, we recommend to position AWS as
the product offering that is "customer obsession rather than competitor
obsession." This will help us to strengthen our foothold in new markets
which will ultimately instill confidence in our customers
 We also recommend making features that its customers will use, not
innovations that will excite industry professionals, which is most likely why
the service has such a loyal following

Spend for the marketing strategies:

Amazon spends 5-10% of the total revenue in marketing activities including AWS.
Considering the revenue of AWS in the year 2019 to be $58 billion. Assuming the total
Marketing spend to be 5% of the total revenue, the marketing spend will be $2.9 Billion

Marketing Activities Percentage of total marketing Amount to be spent (in

activities Million Dollars)
Social media Marketing 35% 101.5
Content Marketing 15% 43.5
 Events 10% 29
Flywheel marketing 5% 14.5
Lock - in Marketing 2% 5.8
Discounts and Offers 5% 14.5
Customer Service 3% 8.7
Evangelist Marketing 5% 14.5
Gamification 5% 14.5
Advertising 15% 43.5

Control Mechanisms:
System for comparing the results with objectives:
System to measure the impact of social media and content marketing:
Google analytics can be made use of in analysing the following metrics
 Social Reach
 Referrals
 Bounce Rate
 Follower Growth Rate
 Engagement
 Social Media Audience Demographics

As AWS is a huge business, it is imperative to have sufficient control mechanisms in place to

map the results with that of the objectives being planned at the beginning.
Financial control mechanism:
The most important control mechanism is keeping track of the financial ratios
1) Working Capital Ratio:
This represents the company’s ability to pay the current liabilities using the
current assets. This is critical ratio because this represents how quickly can
Amazon turn its current assets to pay its liabilities
2) Return on Equity:
As we have the growth margins in the objectives mentioned, it is important to
measure the profitability of the company. This is measured by means of the
Return on Equity. Return on Equity is given by the Net income divided by
Shareholder’s equity
3) Return on Assets:
To build a cloud-based application, it requires decent amount of infrastructure in
place. Therefore, the return on assets will become an important measure in
controlling the results of the financials with that of the objectives. Return on
Assets will be the ratio of Net income to that of the total Assets. Higher ROA
indicates that the company operate with more Asset Efficiency
To measure the growth rates:
1) Earnings Per Share:
This indicates how much money does a company make per stock. This is used
mostly to understand the corporate value which in turn refers to the growth of
the company
2) P/E ratio:
This signifies the company’s performance over the last six months. Price Earning
ratio is the ratio between the current Stock price divided by the earnings per
share. This will also explain the growth rate expectation of the company in the
coming months. For a high P/E ratio, the expectation will be that the company
will grow at a higher rate in the future
Non-financial:
1) Customer Satisfaction:
A set of metrics and KPIs are very much needed to design the Control mechanism
for non-financial metrics
Net Promoter Score:
This refers to the willingness of the customers to recommend the AWS products
to the customers. On the scale of 1 to 10 what will be willingness of the
customers will be useful for us to identify the customer satisfaction of the
customers
Customer Acquisition Cost:
Marketing Expenses / No. of customers gained during the particular period
This is used to measure the customer satisfaction and the overall service of the
company
Online ratings and reviews:
All the ratings available in the blogs and other customer reviews shall be
weighted out to come up with a quantitative scire to understand the satisfaction
levels of the customers
Customer Churn Rate:
This metric will measure the number of new entrants and the retention of the
customers. This will be the direct measure of the customer satisfaction
Customer churn rate = (Customers at the start of quarter-Customers at the end of
quarter)/Customers at the start of quarter
 2) Measuring Loyalty:
Customer Lifetime Value:
It is the measure of the total revenue encompassed by the entire relationship
with the particular customer
CLV = Average Purchase Value * Avg Purchasing frequency * Average Customer
Lifespan
3) Customer Loyalty Index:
It is the most effective tool in tracking the loyalty of the customers over a period
of time.

SEGMENTATION AND TARGETING (STP)

AWS caters to the variety of customers from different industries. It segments the customer
base on the basis of several parameters such as:

 Geography – Currently, AWS is present in 18 geographies. It targets those

geographies with increasing number of opportunities in terms of business growth
and governmental policy support. For example, due to the positive response and
increased revenue from the Mumbai region of India, Hyderabad region has been
 chosen as AWS continues to grow. It also considers availability of resources before
entering into a market.
 Client’s Business Size – AWS caters to the requirements of various known clients
such as Netflix, Facebook, Unilever, etc. AWS is also great for small businesses with
bigger dreams with its flexible pricing and customized options.
 Application and usage – Any company looking for reliable and high-speed cloud
solutions would gravitate towards AWS. Through its communication, it projects the
functionality of AWS and the features it has to offer to the clients belonging to
different industries. It targets on the basis of security, shared services, logging, out-
of-scope, etc.
Positioning: Anticipatory positioning refers to positioning to a market segment that has low
turnover with the anticipation that the turnover will increase in the future. Amazon Web
Services (AWS) is a stark example for anticipatory positioning.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Positioning: Build, Deploy, and Manage Websites, Apps or Processes On AWS' Secure,
Reliable Network.
With heavy competition emerging in the cloud space AWS positions itself as a reliable
network for all computing needs over cloud. The global availability of AWS helps to position
itself as a more prominent choice among its target customers.
It credit goes to its positioning that it is used in variety of industries and market leaders such
as Netflix, McDonals, Facebook, BBC, etc.

Products / Services Attributes: AWS has a plethora of products and services including
analytics, robotics, storage, etc. List of services that AWS provides based on its functionality:
 Database: DynamoDB, ElastiCache, RDS, Redshift
 Storage and CDN: S3, EBS, CloudFront, Glacier, Storage Gateway, Import Export
 Cross-service: Support, Marketplace, Management Console, SDks, IDE Kits and CLIs
 Analytics: Elastic MapReduce, Kinesis, Data Pipeline
 Compute & Networking: EC2, VPC, ELB, WorkSpaces, Auto Scaling, Direct Connect,
Route 53
 Deployment & Management: CloudFormation, CloudWatch, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM,
CloudTrail, OpsWorks, CloudHSM
 App Services: CloudSearch, Elastic Transcoder, SES, SNS, SQS, SWF, AppStream

Building capabilities AWS helps customers use right tool for the job. AWS is always
committed towards solving customer problems through product innovation. One such
example is AWS AMI (Amazon Machine Imaging) which is like a data centre or a virtual
machine that runs in a cloud. It alleviates the pain of working remotely and helps teams to
work together from distant locations.
Amazon Web Services also offers cloud platform which has compute power, content
delivery, storage and many other features that help organisations in deploying applications
and services.
AWS give more additional services within those services than any other cloud provider. This
makes is faster, easier and more cost effective for the customers to move their existing
applications to the cloud.
AWS is continually accelerating its pace of innovation to invent entirely new technologies
that its customers can use to transform their business. For example, pioneering the
serverless computing space with the launch of AWS Lambda, which lets developers run their
code without provisioning or managing services. It also made AWS Sage maker, a fully
managed machine learning service that empowers everyday developers and scientists to use
machine learning without any prior experience.
The AWS infrastructure is built to satisfy the security standards of its most data sensitive
clients.

Distribution:
As the product is a virtual product, so it is made available online at any location. The
products and services under AWS are majorly B2B in nature, so it is basically dealt by the
company sales employees.
It is constantly expanding its global network of AWS regions, so that its customers can
access AWS services to build and run their applications from anywhere in the world. Each of
these regions has multiple availability zones that are physically separated from each other
and connected by low latency, high throughput and highly redundant networking. This
makes it easy to design and operate applications that are scalable, fault tolerant and highly
available.

Pricing: AWS offers you a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 160 cloud services. 
With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and
without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.  AWS pricing is similar to how
you pay for utilities like water and electricity. You only pay for the services you consume,
and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs or termination fees. 

The pricing of AWS includes:

 Per hour Billing

 Region Specific Pricing
  Savings upto 90% on reserved instances
 Get incredibly low prices using spot pricing
Promotion: Amazon AWS celebrates an array of well-known clients to whom it caters to by
providing a high speed, reliable, and innovative cloud solution. It is quite fascinating how the
company engages with the clients and continues to remain the most customer-centric
company that is a part of its mission.

 Content Marketing:
1. Guides and Tutorials: Along with offering support and SEO benefits, the AWS

also offers professionals a chance to learn through various courses on the

website.
2. Blog: The AWS blogs include everything ranging from news and use cases to
covering events. Known as AWS news blog, it also talks about the
product/service features and the value proposition it offers to its customers.
They have also mentioned on November 5, 2020 how AWS region in
Hyderabad is in the works which would be the second AWS region in India
after
Mumbai.

 Social Media Marketing:

1. Twitter: The AWS account has 1.8

million followers where the abbreviated
version of blog content in posted.
2. LinkedIn: AWS also has an official global
page with more than 5 million followers.
Apart from sharing similar content as
shared on Twitter, LinkedIn offers a
direct channel to connect to
professionals and other potential clients.
 3. YouTube: AWS has a considerable presence on YouTube with 431,000
subscribers. Strategizing content creation to stay connected with the clients
would be ideal use of this platform. Workshops and seminars can be held on
this platform for every stakeholder and interested audiences in general.

 Events:
Source: Matillion.com

1. Local Summits: Through these summits, AWS creates a rich experience with
the in-person events held around the world. Due to the ongoing pandemic,
the event in Beijing stood cancelled. However, hosting virtual events is a way
to go.
2. Re: Invent Conference: This is the
flagship event of AWS creating a lot of
press. These conferences are governed
by keynotes, hackathons, workshops and
product announcements. This year in
2020, a free 3-week virtual conference
will be held in Nov-Dec. Positioned as the
world’s premier cloud learning event, a
plethora of speakers attend this event,
sponsored by renowned names, every
year.

 Freemium Business Model: AWS offers a variety

of free plans which includes: free forever, 1-year
 trials and short-term trials. “Free” has a special appeal to the clients and this gives
them a taste of what AWS has to offer, which in turn improves conversion rate.
 Flywheel Marketing: “The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy
that leverages on customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party
sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost
structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.”
Source: aws.amazon.com

Amazon offers apps on apps kind of a technique which urges users to sign up or stay
whenever they release a new service. AWS currently offers more than 140 services,
starting with Simple Queue Service, Elastic Computing (EC2) and Simple cloud
storage (S3). Another feature offered is AWS Partner Network. AWS recommends
vendors from their partner network for highly specialized or fragmented areas. This
also gives them insight into new demand and creates a pipeline for acquisitions.

Source: aws.amazon.com

 Lock-in Marketing: The main aim of a good lock-in strategy should help align your
brand with your consumer, develop a genuine alliance and the opportunity to
establish a deeper relationship with your client base, while at the same time trying
to make it more difficult for the competition to enter into your market room. Many
infrastructure providers have a customer lock-in feature. With proprietary
databases, AWS takes things a step further. This means that without reverse-
engineering an Amazon database engine, once consumers switch, they will not be
able to achieve function parity.
 Discounts and offers: AWS credits are used to offer discounts. Credits can expire like
any other promotional program. AWS follows a price reduction philosophy to target
more customers and increase the usage of its services. Through reduction in
infrastructure cost and increase in revenue, AWS achieves economies of scale.
 Customer Service: Through Micro Marketing, the solutions architects work with the
customers to solve the technical issues and incorporate customer innovativeness
and technology adaptability for newer ideas for the inception of new services.
 Evangelist Marketing: Evangelism marketing is an advanced type of word-of - mouth
marketing in which marketers create clients who believe in a single product or
service so profoundly that they freely attempt to encourage people to purchase it
 and use it. The clients become voluntary activists, constantly sharing the message on
the company's behalf. AWS employs technical evangelists who speak at conferences,
lead user groups and engage in grass roots efforts to help AWS grow. 
 Gamification: Gamification marketing entails combining aspects of gaming into a
non-gaming context in order to increase levels of interaction and inspire consumers
to take particular actions.
1. Deep Racer League: The first major autonomous racing league in the world is
the AWS DeepRacer League. To spur the use of their resources, they use
rivalry.

Source: aws.amazon.com

2. DeepLens Challenge: A series of thematic competitions included using

Amazon SageMaker and AWS DeepLens consisting of the DeepLens
Challenge.
3. Cloud Innovation Challenge: Adoption by the public sector is famously
difficult. Competitions for AWS promote adoption and act as social evidence
for other school districts. AWS points are used as incentives, meaning that
school districts are tied into the programme themselves.
4. IoT App Challenge: Teams were inspired by the IoT App challenge to exploit
AWS services in new ways. Projects were submitted by more than 40 teams.
 Advertising: AWS has embarked on a much more aggressive and broad advertising
strategy. The experiment has included billboards, television advertising, and other
media cantered around the idea that AWS users are “builders,” creators of the
future and The Next Big Thing.
 Source: Builtin.com

Link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n1NpmtJ5G8

REFERENCES
1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2
2. https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/
3. https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-amazon-web-services-the-complete-introduction/
4. https://www.guru99.com/aws-tutorial.html
5. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/amazon_web_services/index.html
-THANK YOU-