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Media and entertainment.

Hulu uses Amazon CloudFront for its VOD delivery. 

Amazon Prime Video

Amazon Prime Video uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver solid streaming experience to more than 18 million football fans.

Dow Jones , the global news and information company, uses Amazon CloudFront to improve their readers' experience. The company also uses Amazon Shield Avanced for DDoS mitigations. 

"We selected Amazon CloudFront for the superior performances in terms of video start time, throughput, and the lower rebuffering rate." Yann Verry, System and Network Manager at Groupe M6. 

Conde Nast Italia

'Like the famous song says, CloudFront is "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”!' Marco Vigano, Digital CTO at Condé Nast Italia. 

Amazon CloudFront delivers a scalable solution to serve up the APIs.

Discovery Communications

Discovery uses Amazon CloudFront for static, dynamic and API delivery. 

Seven Networks

Seven Networks used Amazon' Content Delivery Network (CDN).

TVNZ is New Zealand’s leading free-to-air TV provider, using CloudFront to bring news and entertainment coverage to more than two million New Zealanders every day.

Content Alliance Platform (CAP)-POOQ uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver video content as the CDN service dynamically scales for live and on-demand viewing.

PBS uses Amazon CloudFront for its video streaming. 

Travel Industry

Htrip is a top data service provider for hotels. They deployed Amazon CloudFront to improve services for millions of IoT terminals and provides users with a rich multimedia transmission experience. Their platform manages hotel TV terminals, which requires OTA installation, system updates, advertising and short videos in TV. While improving the experience of tens of thousands of hotel guests, the actual use cost has been reduced to one tenth of the original.

King Digital Entertainment PLC

King uses CloudFront to deliver game content to a global user base.

Rovio uses the CDN for reduced latencies from around the globe for API calls. 

Supercell uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver dynamic web content around the world, using edge locations for improved latency. 

Bandai Namco Studios Inc.

Bandai Namco uses Amazon CloudFront as its Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Social Media

Slack Uses Amazon CloudFront for secure API acceleration. 

The startup uses Amazon CloudFront for fast content delivery and for fast software builds deployments. 

Canon’s Office Imaging Products division benefits from faster development times, lower costs, and global reach by using Amazon Web Services to deliver cloud-based services such as Mobile Print. The Office Imaging Products division uses Amazon CloudFront global content delivery network (CDN) to enable better user experience.

iVX is the world's first universal zero-code development platform. Its versatility is reflected in supporting application development in all scenarios and systems, including OA systems, e-commerce platforms, big data applications, IM applications, websites, games, etc. Developers doesn’t need to write a line of code to efficiently develop high-quality applications. iVX was looking for a CDN for improving their business accessibility and stability. iVX adopted CloudFront because it’s helping reducing latency, improving security, and accelerating developers’ access to their website content. In addition to achieving performance goal, iVX also saw reduced total cost by leveraging CloudFront.

"iVX has been used by many domestic enterprises and individual developers for the development and operation of more than 500,000 commercial and personal applications. We choose CloudFront as the domestic CDN, which not only helps us saving transferring cost from S3 to the end customer, but also provide convenient, fast and efficient access to improve the efficiency of code development, operation and maintenance of their applications.”

Meng Zhiping，iVX CEO

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Example 3: sentiment analysis of social media

A large toy maker has been growing very quickly and expanding their product line. After each new toy release, the company wants to understand how consumers are enjoying and using their products. Additionally, the company wants to ensure that their consumers are having a good experience with their products. As the toy system grows, the company wants to ensure that their products are still relevant to their customers and that they can plan future roadmaps items based on customer feedback. The company wants to capture the following insights from social media:

Understand how consumers are using their products

Ensure customer satisfaction

Plan future roadmaps

Capturing the data from various social networks is relatively easy but the challenge is building the intelligence programmatically. After the data is ingested, the company wants to be able to analyze and classify the data in a cost-effective and programmatic way. To do this, they can use the architecture in the following figure.

Sentiment analysis of social media

First, deploy an Amazon EC2 instance in an Amazon VPC that ingests tweets from Twitter.

Next, create an Amazon Data Firehose delivery stream that loads the streaming tweets into the raw prefix in the solution's S3 bucket.

S3 invokes a Lambda function to analyze the raw tweets using Amazon Translate to translate non-English tweets into English, and Amazon Comprehend to use natural language-processing (NLP) to perform entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

A second Firehose delivery stream loads the translated tweets and sentiment values into the sentiment prefix in the S3 bucket. A third delivery stream loads entities in the entities prefix in the S3 bucket.

This architecture also deploys a data lake that includes AWS Glue for data transformation, Amazon Athena for data analysis, and Amazon QuickSight for data visualization. AWS Glue Data Catalog contains a logical database used to organize the tables for the data in S3. Athena uses these table definitions to query the data stored in S3 and return the information to an Amazon QuickSight dashboard.

By using ML and BI services from AWS including Amazon Translate , Amazon Comprehend , Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight, you can build meaningful, low-cost social media dashboards to analyze customer sentiment, which can lead to better opportunities for acquiring leads, improve website traffic, strengthen customer relationships, and improve customer service.

This example solution automatically provisions and configures the AWS services necessary to capture multi-language tweets in near-real-time, translate them, and display them on a dashboard powered by Amazon QuickSight. You can also capture both the raw and enriched datasets and durably store them in the solution's data lake. This enables data analysts to quickly and easily perform new types of analytics and ML on this data. For more information, see the AI-Driven Social Media Dashboard solution .

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Amazon.com marketing strategy 2023: E-commerce retail giant business case study

What goes into the Amazon marketing strategy secret sauce? Our business case study explores Amazon's revenue model and culture of customer metrics, history of Amazon.com and marketing objectives

In the final quarter of 2022, Amazon reported net sales of over $149.2 billion. This seasonal spike is typical of Amazon's quarterly reporting , but the growth is undeniable as this was the company's highest quarter ever.

There is no doubt that the e-commerce retail giant continues to lead the way in e-commerce growth. The Amazon marketing strategy we are familiar with today has evolved since it was founded in 1994.

I've highlighted the Amazon marketing strategy case study in my books for nearly 20 years now since I think all types of businesses can learn from their digital business strategy. Their response to the pandemic is impressive but not entirely surprising for a brand that is ' customer obsessed '.

From startups and small businesses to large international businesses, we can all learn from their focus on the customer, particularly at this time, testing market opportunities made available by digital technology, and their focus on testing and analysis to improve results.

Their focus on customer experience put Amazon in the role of a thought leader in e-commerce experience. However, whether due to diminished customer service, or increasing customer expectations, or a mixture of the two, fulled by a global pandemic - notably, 2020 was the first time Amazon's ACSI customer satisfaction rating dropped below 80 since launch, to 65%.

With customer satisfaction now measuring at 79% in 2022 , customer satisfaction in Amazon has risen again, but is still not as high as it once was.

Currently, Forbes gives a consensus recommendation to buy Amazon stock, giving a return on assets (TTM) of 1.73%. The stock performance is not as high as we saw in 2020 and 2021, but it did show some growth in late 2022 - early 2023.

I aim to keep this case study up-to-date for readers of the books and Smart Insights readers who may be interested. In it, we look at Amazon's background, revenue model, and sources for the latest business results.

We can also learn from their digital marketing strategy, since they use digital marketing efficiently across all customer communications touchpoints in our RACE Framework :

• Reach : Amazon's initial business growth based on a detailed approach to SEO and AdWords targeting millions of keywords.
• Act : Creating clear and simple experiences through testing and learning.
• Convert : Using personalization to make relevant recommendations and a clear checkout process that many now imitate.
• Engage : Amazon's customer-centric culture delights customers and keeps them coming back for more.

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Amazon's growth and business model evolution

Forbes credits Amazon's success to 3 rules which it breaks, but we 'probably shouldn't'!

• Strategy is about focus - although Amazon has an incredible number of strands to the business today.
• Don’t throw good money after bad - with criticism in particular of Amazon's investment in groceries.
• Your core competencies determine what you can and can’t do - developing the Kindle with no hardware manufacturing experience.

In this way, Forbes outlines a 'risky' approach to marketing strategy which, for Amazon, paid off in dividends. So, there is plenty to learn from studying this company, even if we decide not to replicate all tactics and strategies.

Amazon.com mission and vision

When it first launched, Amazon’s had a clear and ambitious mission. To offer:

Earth’s biggest selection and to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.

Today, with business users of its Amazon Web Service representing a new type of customer, Amazon says:

this goal continues today, but Amazon’s customers are worldwide now and have grown to include millions of Con-sumers, Sellers, Content Creators, Developers, and Enterprises. Each of these groups has different needs, and we always work to meet those needs, by innovating new solutions to make things easier, faster, better, and more cost-effective.

20 years later, Amazon are still customer-centric, in fact, in the latest Amazon Annual report , 2021, Jeff Bezos of Amazon explains customer obsession.

"We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company and believe that our guiding principle of customer obsession is one of our greatest strengths. We seek to offer our customers a comprehensive selection of products, low prices, fast and free delivery, easy-to-use functionality, and timely customer service. By focusing obsessively on customers, we are internally driven to improve our services, add benefits and features, invent new products, lower prices, increase product selection, and speed up shipping times—before we have to."

Amazon business and revenue model

I recommend anyone studying Amazon checks the latest annual reports, proxies, and shareholder letters. The annual filings give a great summary of eBay business and revenue models.

The 2020 report includes a great vision for Digital Agility (reprinted from 1997 in their latest annual report) showing testing of business models that many businesses don't yet have. Amazon explain:

"We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures".

They go on to explain that business models are tested from a long-term perspective, showing the mindset of CEO Jeff Bezos:

We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.

The latest example of innovation in their business model is the launch of Amazon Go, a new kind of store with no checkout required. Boasting a "Just Walk Out Shopping experience",the Amazon Go app users enter the store, take the products they want, and go with no lines and no checkout.

More recently, there have been a range of business model innovations focussed on hardware and new services: Kindle e-readers, Fire Tablet, smartphone and TV, Echo (using the Alexa Artificial Intelligence voice-assistant), grocery delivery, Amazon Fashion and expansion to the business-oriented Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Prime, an annual membership program that includes unlimited free shipping and then involved diversification to a media service with access to unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes.

AWS is less well-known outside of tech people, but Amazon is still pursuing this cloud service aggressively. They now have 10 AWS regions around the world, including the East Coast of the U.S., two on the West Coast, Europe, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Brazil, China, and a government-only region called GovCloud.

Amazon marketing strategy

In their 2008 SEC filing, Amazon describes the vision of their business as to:

“Relentlessly focus on customer experience by offering our customers low prices, convenience, and a wide selection of merchandise.”

The vision is still to consider how the core Amazon marketing strategy value proposition is communicated both on-site and through offline communications.

Of course, achieving customer loyalty and repeat purchases has been key to Amazon’s success. Many dot-coms failed because they succeeded in achieving awareness, but not loyalty. Amazon achieved both. In their SEC filing they stress how they seek to achieve this. They say:

" We work to earn repeat purchases by providing easy-to-use functionality, fast and reliable fulfillment, timely customer service, feature-rich content, and a trusted transaction environment.

Key features of Amazon include:

• editorial and customer reviews;
• manufacturer product information;
• web pages tailored to individual preferences, such as recommendations and notifications; 1-Click® technology;
• secure payment systems;
• image uploads;
• searching on our websites as well as the Internet;
• browsing; and the ability to view selected interior pages and citations, and search the entire contents of many of the books we offer with our “Look Inside the Book” and “Search Inside the Book” features.

The community of online customers also creates feature-rich content, including product reviews, online recommendation lists, wish lists, buying guides, and wedding and baby registries."

In practice, as is the practice for many online retailers, the lowest prices are for the most popular products, with less popular products commanding higher prices and a greater margin for Amazon.

Free shipping offers are used to encourage increase in basket size since customers have to spend over a certain amount to receive free shipping. The level at which free shipping is set is critical to profitability and Amazon has changed it as competition has changed and for promotional reasons.

Amazon communicates the fulfillment promise in several ways including the presentation of the latest inventory availability information, delivery date estimates, and options for expedited delivery, as well as delivery shipment notifications and update facilities.

This focus on customer has translated to excellence in service with the 2004 American Customer Satisfaction Index giving Amazon.com a score of 88 which was at the time, the highest customer satisfaction score ever recorded in any service industry, online or offline.

Round (2004) notes that Amazon focuses on customer satisfaction metrics. Each site is closely monitored with standard service availability monitoring (for example, using Keynote or Mercury Interactive) site availability and download speed. Interestingly it also monitors per minute site revenue upper/lower bounds – Round describes an alarm system rather like a power plant where if revenue on a site falls below $10,000 per minute, alarms go off! There are also internal performance service-level-agreements for web services where T% of the time, different pages must return in X seconds.

The importance of technology and an increased focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

According to founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, technology is very important to supporting this focus on the customer. In their 2010 Annual Report (Amazon, 2011) he said:

“Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques." And while many of our systems are based on the latest in computer science research, this often hasn’t been sufficient: our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken. Many of the problems we face have no textbook solutions, and so we — happily — invent new approaches”… All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do”.

The quote shows how applying new technologies is used to give Amazon a competitive edge. A good recent example of this is providing the infrastructure to deliver the Kindle “Whispersync” update to ebook readers. Amazon reported in 2011 that Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. For every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company sold 115 Kindle books. Kindle apps are now available on Apple iOS, Android devices and on PCs as part of a “ Buy Once, Read Anywhere ” proposition which Amazon has developed.

Some of the more recent applications of AI at Amazon are highly visible, for example, the Amazon Echo assistant and technology in the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines.

In their 2017 report, they describe the increased use of machine learning and AI ‘behind the scenes’ at Amazon:   "much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations".

Amazon Customers

Amazon defines what it refers to as three consumer sets customers, seller customers and developer customers.

There are over 76 million customer accounts, but just 1.3 million active seller customers in it’s marketplaces and Amazon is seeking to increase this. Amazon is unusual for a retailer in that it identifies “developer customers” who use its Amazon Web Services, which provides access to technology infrastructure such as hosting that developers can use to develop their own web services.

Members are also encouraged to join a loyalty program, Amazon Prime, a fee-based membership program in which members receive free or discounted express shipping, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan.

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As we know, e-commerce marketing is all about the customers. Our RACE Growth System down your customer journeys into a simple 5-step structure of plan - reach - act - convert - engage. Create a winning retail e-commerce marketing strategy with Smart Insights, to acquire and retain more customers, and accelerate your ROI. Get started today.

Competition

In its 2017 SEC filing Amazon describes the environment for our products and services as ‘intensely competitive’. It views its main current and potential competitors as:

• 1) online, offline, and multichannel retailers, publishers, vendors, distributors, manufacturers, and producers of the products we offer and sell to consumers and businesses;
• (2) publishers, producers, and distributors of physical, digital, and interactive media of all types and all distribution channels;
• (3) web search engines, comparison shopping websites, social networks, web portals, and other online and app-based means of discovering, using, or acquiring goods and services, either directly or in collaboration with other retailers;
• (4) companies that provide e-commerce services, including website development, advertising, fulfillment, customer service, and payment processing;
• (5) companies that provide fulfillment and logistics services for themselves or for third parties, whether online or offline;
• (6) companies that provide information technology services or products, including on- premises or cloud-based infrastructure and other services; and
• (7) companies that design, manufacture, market, or sell consumer electronics, telecommunication, and electronic devices.

It believes the main competitive factors in its market segments include "selection, price, availability, convenience, information, discovery, brand recognition, personalized services, accessibility, customer service, reliability, speed of fulfillment, ease of use, and ability to adapt to changing conditions, as well as our customers’ overall experience and trust in transactions with us and facilitated by us on behalf of third-party sellers".

For services offered to business and individual sellers, additional competitive factors include the quality of our services and tools, their ability to generate sales for third parties we serve, and the speed of performance for our services.

From Auctions to marketplaces

Amazon auctions (known as zShops) were launched in March 1999, in large part as a response to the success of eBay. They were promoted heavily from the home page, category pages and individual product pages. Despite this, a year after its launch it had only achieved a 3.2% share of the online auction compared to 58% for eBay and it only declined from this point.

Today, competitive prices of products are available through third-party sellers in the ‘Amazon Marketplace’ which are integrated within the standard product listings. A winning component of the Amazon marketing strategy for marketplaces was the innovation to offer such an auction facility, initially driven by the need to compete with eBay. But now the strategy has been adjusted such that Amazon describe it as part of the approach of low-pricing.

Although it might be thought that Amazon would lose out on enabling its merchants to sell products at lower prices, in fact Amazon makes greater margin on these sales since merchants are charged a commission on each sale and it is the merchant who bears the cost of storing inventory and fulfilling the product to customers. As with eBay, Amazon is just facilitating the exchange of bits and bytes between buyers and sellers without the need to distribute physical products.

Amazon Media sales

You may have noticed that unlike some retailers, Amazon displays relevant Google text ads and banner ads from brands. This seems in conflict with the marketing strategy of focus on experience since it leads to a more cluttered store. However in 2011 Amazon revealed that worldwide media sales accounted for approximately 17% of revenue!

Whilst it does not reveal much about the Amazon marketing strategy approach in its annual reports, but there seems to be a focus on online marketing channels. Amazon (2011) states “we direct customers to our websites primarily through a number of targeted online marketing channels, such as our Associates program, sponsored search, portal advertising, email marketing campaigns, and other initiatives”.

These other initiatives may include outdoor and TV advertising, but they are not mentioned specifically. In this statement they also highlight the importance of customer loyalty tools. They say: “while costs associated with free shipping are not included in marketing expense, we view free shipping offers and Amazon Prime as effective worldwide marketing tools, and intend to continue offering them indefinitely”.

How ‘The Culture of Metrics’ started

A common theme in Amazon’s development is the drive to use a measured approach to all aspects of the business, beyond the finance. Marcus (2004) describes an occasion at a corporate ‘boot-camp’ in January 1997 when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ‘saw the light’. ‘

At Amazon, we will have a Culture of Metrics’, he said while addressing his senior staff. He went on to explain how web-based business gave Amazon an ‘amazing window into human behaviour’.

Marcus says: ‘Gone were the fuzzy approximations of focus groups, the anecdotal fudging and smoke blowing from the marketing department' - the Amazon marketing strategy was reborn!

A company like Amazon could (and did) record every move a visitor made, every last click and twitch of the mouse. As the data piled up into virtual heaps, hummocks and mountain ranges, you could draw all sorts of conclusions about their chimerical nature, the consumer. In this sense, Amazon was not merely a store, but an immense repository of facts. All we needed were the right equations to plug into them’.

James Marcus then goes on to give a fascinating insight into a breakout group discussion of how Amazon could better use measures to improve its performance. Marcus was in the Bezos group, brainstorming customer-centric metrics. Marcus (2004) summarises the dialogue, led by Bezos:

"First, we figure out which things we’d like to measure on the site", he said.

"For example, let’s say we want a metric for customer enjoyment. How could we calculate that?"

"There was silence. Then somebody ventured: "How much time each customer spends on the site?"

"Not specific enough", Jeff said.

"How about the average number of minutes each customer spends on the site per session" someone else suggested. "If that goes up, they’re having a blast".

"But how do we factor in the purchase?" I [Marcus] said feeling proud of myself.

"Is that a measure of enjoyment"?

"I think we need to consider the frequency of visits, too", said a dark-haired woman I didn’t recognize.

“Lot of folks are still accessing the web with those creepy-crawly modems. Four short visits from them might be just as good as one visit from a guy with a T-1. Maybe better’.

"Good point", Jeff said. "And anyway, enjoyment is just the start. In the end, we should be measuring customer ecstasy"

It is interesting that Amazon was having this debate about the elements of RFM analysis (described in Chapter 6 of Internet Marketing), 1997, after already having achieved $16 million of revenue in the previous year. Of course, this is a minuscule amount compared with today’s billions of dollar turnover. The important point was that this was the start of a focus on metrics which can be seen through the description of Matt Pounds work later in this case study.

Amazon marketing strategy experiments!

Amazon have created their own internal experimentation platform called a “Weblab” that they use to evaluate improvements to our websites and products. In 2013, they ran 1,976 Weblabs worldwide, up from 1,092 in 2012, and 546 in 2011. Now many companies use AB testing, but this shows the scale of testing at Amazon.

One example of how these are applied is a new feature called “Ask an owner”.  From a product page, customers can ask any question related to the product, Amazon then route these questions to owners of the product who answer.

From human to software-based recommendations

Amazon marketing strategy has developed internal tools to support this ‘Culture of Metrics’. Marcus (2004) describes how the ‘Creator Metrics’ tool shows content creators how well their product listings and product copy are working. For each content editor such as Marcus, it retrieves all recently posted documents including articles, interviews, booklists and features. For each one it then gives a conversion rate to sale plus the number of page views, adds (added to basket) and repels (content requested, but the back button then used).

In time, the work of editorial reviewers such as Marcus was marginalised since Amazon found that the majority of visitors used the search tools rather than read editorial and they responded to the personalised recommendations as the matching technology improved (Marcus likens early recommendations techniques to ‘going shopping with the village idiot’).

Experimentation and testing at Amazon.com

The ‘Culture of Metrics’ also led to a test-driven approach to improving results at Amazon. Matt Round, speaking at E-metrics 2004 when he was director of personalisation at Amazon describes the philosophy as ‘Data Trumps Intuitions’. He explained how Amazon used to have a lot of arguments about which content and promotion should go on the all important home page or category pages. He described how every category VP wanted top-center and how the Friday meetings about placements for next week were getting ‘too long, too loud, and lacked performance data’.

But today ‘automation replaces intuitions’ and real-time experimentation tests are always run to answer these questions since actual consumer behaviour is the best way to decide upon tactics.

Marcus (2004) also notes that Amazon has a culture of experiments of which A/B tests are key components. Examples where A/B tests are used include new home page design, moving features around the page, different algorithms for recommendations, changing search relevance rankings. These involve testing a new treatment against a previous control for a limited time of a few days or a week. The system will randomly show one or more treatments to visitors and measure a range of parameters such as units sold and revenue by category (and total), session time, session length, etc. The new features will usually be launched if the desired metrics are statistically significantly better.

Statistical tests are a challenge though as distributions are not normal (they have a large mass at zero for example of no purchase) There are other challenges since multiple A/B tests are running every day and A/B tests may overlap and so conflict. There are also longer-term effects where some features are ‘cool’ for the first two weeks and the opposite effect where changing navigation may degrade performance temporarily. Amazon also finds that as its users evolve in their online experience the way they act online has changed. This means that Amazon has to constantly test and evolve its features.

With the latest announcement from Google to sunset their Google Optimize A/B testing , digital marketers will do well to look out for new technology to assist in their testing efforts. We'll keep our members updated with announcements

Amazon.com technology marketing strategy

It follows that the Amazon technology infrastructure must readily support this culture of experimentation and this can be difficult to achieved with standardised content management. Amazon has achieved its competitive advantage through developing its technology internally and with a significant investment in this which may not be available to other organisations without the right focus on the online channels.

As Amazon explains in SEC (2005) ‘using primarily our own proprietary technologies, as well as technology licensed from third parties, we have implemented numerous features and functionality that simplify and improve the customer shopping experience, enable third parties to sell on our platform, and facilitate our fulfillment and customer service operations. Our current strategy is to focus our development efforts on continuous innovation by creating and enhancing the specialized, proprietary software that is unique to our business, and to license or acquire commercially-developed technology for other applications where available and appropriate. We continually invest in several areas of technology, including our seller platform; A9.com, our wholly-owned subsidiary focused on search technology on www.A9.com and other Amazon sites; web services; and digital initiatives.’

Round (2004) describes the technology approach as ‘distributed development and deployment’. Pages such as the home page have a number of content ‘pods’ or ‘slots’ which call web services for features. This makes it relatively easy to change the content in these pods and even change the location of the pods on-screen. Amazon uses a flowable or fluid page design unlike many sites which enables it to make the most of real-estate on-screen.

Technology also supports more standard e-retail facilities. SEC (2005) states: ‘We use a set of applications for accepting and validating customer orders, placing and tracking orders with suppliers, managing and assigning inventory to customer orders, and ensuring proper shipment of products to customers. Our transaction-processing systems handle millions of items, a number of different status inquiries, multiple shipping addresses, gift-wrapping requests, and multiple shipment methods. These systems allow the customer to choose whether to receive single or several shipments based on availability and to track the progress of each order. These applications also manage the process of accepting, authorizing, and charging customer credit cards.’

Data-driven Automation

Round (2004) said that ‘Data is king at Amazon’. He gave many examples of data driven automation including customer channel preferences; managing the way content is displayed to different user types such as new releases and top-sellers, merchandising and recommendation (showing related products and promotions) and also advertising through paid search (automatic ad generation and bidding).

The automated search advertising and bidding system for paid search has had a big impact at Amazon. Sponsored links initially done by humans, but this was unsustainable due to range of products at Amazon. The automated programme generates keywords, writes ad creative, determines best landing page, manages bids, measure conversion rates, profit per converted visitor and updates bids. Again the problem of volume is there, Matt Round described how the book ‘How to Make Love Like a Porn Star’ by Jenna Jameson received tens of thousands of clicks from pornography-related searches, but few actually purchased the book. So the update cycle must be quick to avoid large losses.

There is also an automated email measurement and optimization system. The campaign calendar used to be manually managed with relatively weak measurement and it was costly to schedule and use. A new system:

• Automatically optimizes content to improve customer experience
• Avoids sending an e-mail campaign that has low clickthrough or high unsubscribe rate
• Includes inbox management (avoid sending multiple emails/week)
• Has growing library of automated email programs covering new releases and recommendations

But there are challenges if promotions are too successful if inventory isn’t available.

Your Recommendations

Customers Who Bought X…, also bought Y is Amazon’s signature feature. Round (2004) describes how Amazon relies on acquiring and then crunching a massive amount of data. Every purchase, every page viewed and every search is recorded. So there are now to new version, customers who shopped for X also shopped for… and Customers who searched for X also bought… They also have a system codenamed ‘Goldbox’ which is a cross-sell and awareness raising tool. Items are discounted to encourage purchases in new categories!

See the original more detailed PDF article on Amazon personalization / recommendation collaborative filtering system .

He also describes the challenge of techniques for sifting patterns from noise (sensitivity filtering) and clothing and toy catalogues change frequently so recommendations become out of date. The main challenges though are the massive data size arising from millions of customers, millions of items and recommendations made in real time.

Amazon marketing strategy for partnerships

As Amazon grew, its share price growth enabled partnership or acquisition with a range of companies in different sectors. Marcus (2004) describes how Amazon partnered with Drugstore.com (pharmacy), Living.com (furniture), Pets.com (pet supplies), Wineshopper.com (wines), HomeGrocer.com (groceries), Sothebys.com (auctions) and Kozmo.com (urban home delivery). In most cases, Amazon purchased an equity stake in these partners, so that it would share in their prosperity. It also charged them fees for placements on the Amazon site to promote and drive traffic to their sites.

Similarly, Amazon marketing strategy was to charge publishers for prime-position to promote books on its site which caused an initial hue-and-cry, but this abated when it was realised that paying for prominent placements was widespread in traditional booksellers and supermarkets. Many of these new online companies failed in 1999 and 2000, but Amazon had covered the potential for growth and was not pulled down by these partners, even though for some such as Pets.com it had an investment of 50%.

Analysts sometimes refer to ‘Amazoning a sector’ meaning that one company becomes dominant in an online sector such as book retail such that it becomes very difficult for others to achieve market share. In addition to developing, communicating and delivering a very strong proposition, Amazon has been able to consolidate its strength in different sectors through its partnership arrangements and through using technology to facilitate product promotion and distribution via these partnerships. The Amazon retail platform enables other retailers to sell products online using the Amazon user interface and infrastructure through their ‘Syndicated Stores’ programme.

For example, in the UK, Waterstones (www.waterstones.co.uk) is one of the largest traditional bookstores. It found competition with online so expensive and challenging, that eventually it entered a partnership arrangement where Amazon markets and distributes its books online in return for a commission online. Similarly, in the US, Borders a large book retailer uses the Amazon merchant platform for distributing its products.

Toy retailer Toys R’ Us have a similar arrangement. Such partnerships help Amazon extends its reach into the customer-base of other suppliers, and of course, customers who buy in one category such as books can be encouraged to purchase into other areas such as clothing or electronics.

Another form of partnership referred to above is the Amazon Marketplace which enables Amazon customers and other retailers to sell their new and used books and other goods alongside the regular retail listings. A similar partnership approach is the Amazon ‘Merchants@’ program which enables third party merchants (typically larger than those who sell via the Amazon Marketplace) to sell their products via Amazon. Amazon earn fees either through fixed fees or sales commissions per-unit. This arrangement can help customers who get a wider choice of products from a range of suppliers with the convenience of purchasing them through a single checkout process.

Finally, Amazon marketing strategy has also facilitated formation of partnerships with smaller companies through its affiliates programme. Internet legend records that Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon was chatting to someone at a cocktail party who wanted to sell books about divorce via her web site. Subsequently, Amazon.com launched its Associates Program in July 1996 and it is still going strong.

Here, the Amazon marketing strategy has created a tiered performance-based incentives to encourage affiliates to sell more Amazon products.

Amazon Marketing strategy communications

In their SEC filings Amazon state that the aims of their communications strategy are (unsurprisingly) to:

• Increase customer traffic to our websites
• Create awareness of our products and services
• Promote repeat purchases
• Develop incremental product and service revenue opportunities
• Strengthen and broaden the Amazon.com brand name.

Amazon also believes that its most effective marketing communications are a consequence of their focus on continuously improving the customer experience. This then creates word-of-mouth promotion which is effective in acquiring new customers and may also encourage repeat customer visits.

As well as this Marcus (2004) describes how Amazon used the personalisation enabled through technology to reach out to a difficult to reach market which Bezos originally called ‘the hard middle’. Bezos’s view was that it was easy to reach 10 people (you called them on the phone) or the ten million people who bought the most popular products (you placed a superbowl ad), but more difficult to reach those in between. The search facilities in the search engine and on the Amazon site, together with its product recommendation features meant that Amazon could connect its products with the interests of these people.

Online advertising techniques include paid search marketing, interactive ads on portals, e-mail campaigns and search engine optimisation. These are automated as far as possible as described earlier in the case study. As previously mentioned, the affiliate programme is also important in driving visitors to Amazon and Amazon offers a wide range of methods of linking to its site to help improve conversion.

For example, affiliates can use straight text links leading direct to a product page and they also offer a range of dynamic banners which feature different content such as books about Internet marketing or a search box. Amazon also use cooperative advertising arrangements, better known as ‘contra-deals’ with some vendors and other third parties. For example, a print advertisement in 2005 for a particular product such as a wireless router with a free wireless laptop card promotion will feature a specific Amazon URL in the ad. In product fulfilment packs, Amazon may include a leaflet for a non-competing online company such as Figleaves.com (lingerie) or Expedia (travel). In return, Amazon leaflets may be included in customer communications from the partner brands.

Our Associates program directs customers to our websites by enabling independent websites to make millions of products available to their audiences with fulfillment performed by us or third parties. We pay commissions to hundreds of thousands of participants in our Associates program when their customer referrals result in product sales.

In addition, we offer everyday free shipping options worldwide and recently announced Amazon.com Prime in the U.S., our first membership program in which members receive free two-day shipping and discounted overnight shipping. Although marketing expenses do not include the costs of our free shipping or promotional offers, we view such offers as effective marketing tools.

Marcus, J. (2004) Amazonia. Five years at the epicentre of the dot-com juggernaut, The New Press, New York, NY.

Round, M. (2004) Presentation to E-metrics, London, May 2005. www.emetrics.org.

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here . Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice . In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary . Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question .

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Case studies of AWS serverless apps in production

Are you considering building a new serverless app on AWS? Or maybe migrating an existing workload to a serverless architecture?

Then you probably have a lot of exploratory research ahead of you. Reading tutorials and technical docs on how Lambda and other services work is important and you might even decide to put together a proof of concept app to understand what it’s like to develop on.

But to really get a feel for what it will be like running your app in production, you need to get the warts-and-all lowdown from people who’ve already navigated this path rather than naively jumping in head-first.

Yes Amazon themselves provide a “Customer Success” website dedicated to case studies but this is effectively just a marketing exercise with no real insight into the more technical challenges that the customer encountered. Nice fluff for business execs but pretty useless to engineers.

To help with this, I’ve curated the following list of articles from across the web written by organisations who built their production workloads with real users on a serverless AWS architecture. The articles describe the problems they hit along the way, the solutions they arrived at and an overall summary of the impact on their organisation.

The Case Studies

I’ve ranked each article using a Pain Index 🤕 — a score out of 5 based on how much the author goes into detail on the pains they encountered using serverless techs and tools.

How Ipdata Serves 25M API Calls From 10 Infinitely Scalable Global Endpoints For $150 A Month

Our (not so smooth) journey productising a serverless app on aws, how i built a serverless web crawler to mine vancouver real estate data at scale, lessons learned  —  a year of going “fully serverless” in production, building a serverless, on-demand data science solution, going serverless: from common lisp and cgi to aws lambda and api gateway, how i scaled my static website to a global market for a fraction of the cost on aws, accelerating cross platform development with serverless microservices, serverless monitoring and notification pipeline, a case study for serverless integration: customizing opsgenie’s zendesk integration with aws lambda, how locize leverages serverless, making mot a live service, running an entire company on serverless — cloudspoilt, serverless  —  the future of software architecture, serverless case study - coca-cola.

Have your own serverless story? I will be evolving this list regularly, so if you’ve built a production serverless app on AWS and wrote about it somewhere, just drop me a message with a link to your article and I’ll happily add it.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Concerns that go away in a serverless world
• How to deploy a high availability web app to AWS ECS
• How to calculate the billing savings of moving an EC2 app to Lambda

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• Lesson 1: Why serverless is inevitable
• Lesson 2: How to identify a candidate project for your first serverless application
• Lesson 3: How to compose the building blocks that AWS provides
• Lesson 4: Common mistakes to avoid when building your first serverless application
• Lesson 5: How to break ground on your first serverless project

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Social Media App Migration to AWS

Transforming an existing legacy environment and building it natively on  AWS .

A leading social media company’s apps explore the humanness of people instead of simply quantifying how good they are, or judging how professional their work may be. Users can upload their work directly to their platform, using it to edit photos, with enhancements – including white-balancing, filters and journaling – readily available. One user documented his mother’s fight with cancer, displaying the emotions he and his family felt during a very trying time.

In 2015, the company acquired a platform that creates tangible photo books, prints and gifts for digital photos. The platform was using a non-native environment and didn’t believe it was the right strategic technology in the long term. The combined companies have more than 30 million monthly active users across its platform consuming 5 billion images. Reliable infrastructure users can depend on is essential. The company wanted to work with experts who to help them transform their existing legacy environment and build it cloud natively on AWS.

30 million monthly active users consuming 5 billion images Reliable infrastructure users can depend on is essential. The company wanted to work with experts who to help them transform their existing non-native environment and build it cloud natively on AWS.

The companies  DevOps  team is very capable – they had significant experience with Chef, using it to configure their servers and developer machines –  but the transformation to AWS required resources the team just didn’t have.

The transformation to AWS required resources the company’s team just didn’t have.

30 million monthly active users consuming 5 billion images.

Reliable infrastructure users can depend on is essential. The company wanted to work with experts who to help them transform their existing non-native environment and build it cloud natively on AWS.

The Solution

Since the migration from social media to AWS, the company has seen great benefits: “Operationally, AWS is faster and more configurable than what was being used,” said the VP of Engineering at the company. “The new environment is faster, more reliable, and cost efficient. All three are pretty important things!”

Most importantly, this solution had a big impact on the stability of the company’s platform and by extension, its brand. Previously, the platform had experienced random reboots on several occasions. The successful migration from social media to AWS allowed them to have confidence going into the holiday season, their most important quarter of the year.  Confidence in the reliability and performance of their platform allowed the company to focus on maintaining a great experience for their user community.

“The experts had both the attitude and the aptitude, and I feel as comfortable as I possibly could in having AWS as the long-term foundation for our infrastructure.”

Bring in the Experts

With the support of our experts the company was able to seamlessly migrate from its existing environment to  AWS . From the start, the company was impressed with our experts knowledge and expertise. “They inspired a lot of confidence, and their team clearly had the technological expertise,” said the VP of Engineering. “We knew they could get the job done.”

Our experts leveraged their extensive experience with Vagrant and Packer to build a strong foundation for the company’s cloud native environment.  This enabled the company to emulate the user experience of their members. The insights they gained helped them improve their product, streamline their operations and deliver an optimized user experience.

“Technology expertise is the number one thing we look for when hiring an outside firm,” said the VP of Engineering. “The experts had both the attitude and the aptitude, and I feel as comfortable as I possibly could in having AWS as the long-term foundation for our infrastructure.”

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Case studies: Adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS) for success

Three small case studies of UK businesses/organisations help demonstrate how adopting AWS can help bring success in the form of scalability.

For cloud infrastructure Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a market leader, according to Andrew Rigg, the Managed Services Solution Architect at Perfect Image. AWS holds approximately one third of the UK market.

Rigg explains how businesses are seeing more new and innovative ways to use AWS than ever before. Rigg explains to Digital Journal the possibilities through a description of three case studies.

Case study #1: Availability and disaster recovery – case study: Bellway Homes

Rigg explains that that since it is operating in the fast-paced and highly competitive property market “email and system uptime is critical for Bellway Homes. Even an outage of a few minutes could see the business lose thousands to its competitors.”

In outlining the case, Rigg explains: “Bellway had been experiencing storage and reliability issues for its emails, which was hindering its ability to carry out and close critical business deals. It was reliant on a virtualised platform that provided shared storage, and it needed a more reliable system.”

He adds: “Through working with managed AWS services partner Perfect Image, Bellway Homes was able to migrate to an AWS platform that offered greater reliability, scalability, and a much faster disaster recovery option. Previously, recovering the email system could take up to eight hours with a chance of failure, but the new AWS solution allows it to be recovered in just 15 minutes with an almost 100 percent success rate.”

Bellway Homes has also benefitted from AWS in a number of different ways. With no hardware required to scale the solution, less manual maintenance, no physical backup requirements, and a flexible pay-as-you-go contract, the business was able to reduce its infrastructure costs.

Case study #2: Unparalleled scalability and innovation – case study: NHS Digital

NHS Digital is a government agency that provides technology services to the health service. Rigg explains that the agency “was required to not only push out new solutions quickly, securely, and effectively but also scale and extend its existing services.”

In particular, he notes: “The 111 triage service, which was used to support people with a myriad of COVID-19 queries and support, was rolled out quickly and effectively thanks to the flexibility allowed by AWS.”

In addition to these new services, which also included identifying and contacting clinically vulnerable patients and vaccination service systems, NHS Digital also needed to scale its existing services.

Rigg adds: “Early in the pandemic, the peak load of one system was 95 times higher than it had ever been. Availability of 99.999 percent was essential for success, and NHS Digital relied heavily on the strict security protocols around AWS due to regulatory patient confidentiality.”

Furthermore, according to NHS Digital CEO Sarah Wilkinson , the “elasticity” of AWS was critical to meeting this demand: “AWS has made much of this possible over the past year. We’ve been building out our AWS estate for many years, and many times we’ve reflected on the value of the AWS environment in which we operate those services today and the extraordinary power it gives us in terms of extreme scaling and deployment.”

The AWS technology is also being used as a platform for future innovation and digital transformation. Wilkinson continues: “In terms of our AWS relationship, I have absolutely no doubt that what we’ve achieved in this environment to date is a tiny fraction of what we’ll achieve in the coming years.”

Future plans for the AWS platform include leveraging centralised control of hospital devices, which could range from radiology equipment to IoT devices on hospital beds, to organising, structuring, and making sense of its mountains of unstructured but essential patient data.

Case study #3: Efficient deliveries and employee satisfaction – case study: Deliveroo

Deliveroo operates in a saturated market, which means that a competitive edge is essential. With a presence in 12 countries worldwide including its UK base, the company caters to multiple markets, all with differing needs and fluctuating demands.

By using AWS and Amazon SageMaker, Deliveroo was able to differentiate itself from its competitors through its efficient dispatch services.

According to Rigg: “Instead of using only geo-location data to assign a driver to an order, the company now uses an intelligent AWS machine learning system that will take into consideration driver pickup and delivery timescales, as well as a meal prep estimate.”

There were other advantages too, says Rigg: “The intelligent use of machine learning not only helps Deliveroo to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction but also keeps its drivers loyal and dissuades them from defecting to competitors. This is because it allows them to be more efficient, delivering more orders during their shifts and earning more money.”

Deliveroo first implemented AWS in 2017 .However, the technology came in especially useful during COVID-19 lockdowns, which saw demand for deliveries triple in the face of 80 per cent of restaurants closing. The company decided to focus on immediate cash flow instead of growth and was empowered to do this through the flexibility of AWS. Deliveroo scaled back resource-heavy features like auto-generated restaurant suggestions because they were being used less, allowing the business to focus on its most profitable features. Summing up these examples, Rigg states: “ Most businesses have now migrated at least some of their workloads to the cloud, with cloud computing becoming the norm. Many cloud platforms offer hosting and storage, but solutions like AWS go beyond these basic services to offer an outstanding opportunity for businesses to do more than ever before.”

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

Home Blog Cloud Computing AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

With its extensive range of cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completely changed the way businesses run. Organisations demonstrate how AWS has revolutionized their operations by enabling scalability, cost-efficiency, and innovation through many case studies. AWS's computing power, storage, database management, and artificial intelligence technologies have benefited businesses of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations. These include improved security, agility, worldwide reach, and lower infrastructure costs. With Amazon AWS educate program it helps businesses in various industries to increase growth, enhance workflow, and maintain their competitiveness in today's ever-changing digital landscape. So, let's discuss the AWS cloud migration case study   and its importance in getting a better understanding of the topic in detail.

What are AWS Case Studies, and Why are They Important?

The   AWS case   studies comprehensively explain how companies or organizations have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to solve problems, boost productivity, and accomplish objectives. These studies provide real-life scenarios of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in operation, showcasing the wide range of sectors and use cases in which AWS can be successfully implemented. They offer vital lessons and inspiration for anyone considering or already using AWS by providing insights into the tactics, solutions, and best practices businesses use the AWS Cloud Engineer program . The Amazon ec2 case study   is crucial since it provides S's capabilities, assisting prospective clients in comprehending the valuable advantages and showcasing AWS's dependability, scalability, and affordability in fostering corporate innovation and expansion.

What are the Services Provided by AWS, and What are its Use Cases?

The   case study on AWS in Cloud Computing provided and its use cases mentioned:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Use Cases

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables you to quickly spin up virtual computers with no initial expenditure and no need for a significant hardware investment. Use the AWS admin console or automation scripts to provision new servers for testing and production environments promptly and shut them down when not in use.

AWS EC2 use cases consist of:

• With options for load balancing and auto-scaling, create a fault-tolerant architecture.
• Select EC2 accelerated computing instances if you require a lot of processing power and GPU capability for deep learning and machine learning.

Relational Database Service (RDS) Use Cases

Since Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database service, it alleviates the stress associated with maintaining, administering, and other database-related responsibilities.

AWS RDS uses common cases, including:

• Without additional overhead or staff expenditures, a new database server can be deployed in minutes and significantly elevate dependability and uptime. It is the perfect fit for complex daily database requirements that are OLTP/transactional.
• RDS should be utilized with NoSQL databases like Amazon OpenSearch Service (for text and unstructured data) and DynamoDB (for low-latency/high-traffic use cases).

AWS Workspaces

AWS offers Amazon Workspaces, a fully managed, persistent desktop virtualization service, to help remote workers and give businesses access to virtual desktops within the cloud. With it, users can access the data, apps, and resources they require from any supported device, anywhere, at any time.

AWS workspaces use cases

• IT can set up and manage access fast. With the web filter, you can allow outgoing traffic from a Workspace to reach your chosen internal sites.
• Some companies can work without physical offices and rely solely on SaaS apps. Thus, there is no on-premises infrastructure. They use cloud-based desktops via AWS Workspaces and other services in these situations.

AWS Case Studies

Now, we'll be discussing different case studies of AWS, which are mentioned below: -

Case Study - 1: Modern Web Application Platform with AWS

American Public Media, the programming section of Minnesota Public Radio, is one of the world's biggest producers and distributors of public television. To host their podcast, streaming music, and news websites on AWS, they worked to develop a proof of concept.

After reviewing an outdated active-passive disaster recovery plan, MPR decided to upgrade to a cloud infrastructure to modernize its apps and methodology. This infrastructure would need to be adaptable to changes within the technology powering their apps, scalable to accommodate their audience growth, and resilient to support their disaster recovery strategy.

MPR and AWS determined that MPR News and the public podcast websites should be hosted on the new infrastructure to show off AWS as a feasible choice. Furthermore, AWS must host multiple administrative apps to demonstrate its private cloud capabilities. These applications would be an image manager, a schedule editor, and a configuration manager.

To do this, AWS helped MPR set up an EKS Kubernetes cluster . The apps would be able to grow automatically according to workload and traffic due to the cluster. AWS and MPR developed Elasticsearch at Elastic.co and a MySQL instance in RDS to hold application data.

Business Benefits

Considerable cost savings were made possible by the upgraded infrastructure. Fewer servers would need to be acquired for these vital applications due to the decrease in hardware requirements. Additionally, switching to AWS made switching from Akamai CDN to CloudFront simple. This action reduced MPR's yearly expenses by thousands.

Case Study - 2: Platform Modernisation to Deploy to AWS

Foodsby was able to proceed with its expansion goals after receiving a $6 million investment in 2017, but it still needed to modernize its mobile and web applications. For a faster time to launch to AWS, they improved and enhanced their web, iOS, and Android applications.

Sunsetting technology put this project on a surged timeline. Selecting the mobile application platform required serious analysis and expert advice to establish consensus across internal stakeholders.

Improving the creation of front-end and back-end web apps that separated them into microservices to enable AWS hosting, maximizing scalability. Strengthening recommended full Native for iOS and Android and quickly creating and implementing that solution.

Case Study - 3: Cloud Platform with Kubernetes

SPS Commerce hired AWS to assist them with developing a more secure cloud platform, expanding their cloud deployment choices through Kubernetes, and educating their engineers on these advanced technologies.

SPS serves over 90,000 retail, distribution, grocery, and e-commerce businesses. However, to maintain its growth, SPS needs to remove obstacles to deploying new applications on AWS and other cloud providers in the future. They wanted a partner to teach their internal development team DevOps principles and reveal them to Kubernetes best practices, even though they knew Kubernetes would help them achieve this.

To speed up new project cycle times, decrease ramp-up times, and improve the team's Kubernetes proficiency, it assisted with developing a multi-team, Kubernetes-based platform with a uniform development method. The standards for development and deployment and assisted them in establishing the deployment pipeline.

Most teams can plug, play, and get code up and running quickly due to the streamlined deployment interface. SPS Commerce benefits from Kubernetes' flexibility and can avoid vendor lock-in, which they require to switch cloud providers.

Case Study - 4: Using Unified Payment Solutions to Simplify Government Services

The customer, who had a portfolio of firms within its authority, needed to improve experience to overcome the difficulty of combining many payment methods into a single, unified solution.

Due to the customers' varied acquisitions, the payment system landscape became fragmented, making it more difficult for clients to make payments throughout a range of platforms as well as technologies. Providing a streamlined payment experience could have been improved by this lack of coherence and standardization.

It started developing a single, cloud-based payment system that complies with the customers' microservices-based reference design. CRUD services were created after the user interface for client administration was set at the beginning of the project.

With this, the customer can streamline operations and increase efficiency by providing a smooth payment experience.

The new system demonstrated a tremendous improvement over the old capability, demonstrating the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second.

Maintaining system consistency and facilitating scalability and maintenance were made more accessible by aligning with the reference architecture.

Case Study - 5: Accelerated Data Migration to AWS

They selected improvements to create   an   AWS cloud migration case study cloud platform to safely transfer their data from a managed service provider to AWS during the early phases of a worldwide pandemic.

Early in 2020, COVID-19 was discovered, and telemedicine services were used to lessen the strain on hospital infrastructure. The number of telehealth web queries increased dramatically overnight, from 5,000 to 40,000 per minute. Through improvement, Zipnosis was able to change direction and reduce the duration of its AWS migration plan from six to three months. The AWS architecture case study includes HIPAA, SOC2, and HITRUST certification requirements. They also wanted to move their historic database smoothly across several web-facing applications while adhering to service level agreements (SLAs), which limited downtime.

Using Terraform and Elastic Kubernetes Service, the AWS platform creates a modern, infrastructure-as-code, HIPAA-compliant, and HITRUST-certified environment. With the help of serverless components, tools were developed to roll out an Application Envelope, enabling the creation of a HIPAA-compliant environment that could be activated quickly.

Currently, Zipnosis has internal platform management. Now that there is more flexibility, scaling up and down is more affordable and accessible. Their services are more marketable to potential clients because of their scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure. Their use of modern technologies, such as Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, simplifies hiring top people. Zipnosis is in an excellent position to move forward.

Case Study - 6: Transforming Healthcare Staffing

The customer's outdated application presented difficulties. It was based on the outdated DBROCKET platform and needed an intuitive user interface, testing tools, and extensibility. Modernizing the application was improving the job and giving the customer an improved, scalable, and maintainable solution.

Although the customer's old application was crucial for predicting hospital staffing needs, maintenance, and improvements were challenging due to its reliance on the obscure DBROCKET platform. Hospitals lost money on inefficient staff scheduling due to the application's lack of responsiveness and a mobile-friendly interface.

Choosing Spring Boot and Groovy for back-end development to offer better maintainability and extensibility throughout the improved migration of the application from DBROCKET to a new technology stack. Unit tests were used to increase the reliability and standard of the code.

Efficiency at Catalis increased dramatically when the advanced document redaction technology was put in place. They were able to process papers at a significantly higher rate because the automated procedure cut down the time and effort needed for manual redaction.

Catalis cut infrastructure costs by utilizing serverless architecture and cloud-based services. They saved a significant amount of money because they were no longer required to upgrade and maintain on-premises servers.

The top-notch Knowledgehut best Cloud Computing courses that meet different demands and skill levels are available at KnowledgeHut. Through comprehensive curriculum, hands-on exercises, and expert-led instruction, attendees may learn about and gain practical experience with cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Professionals who complete these courses will be efficient to succeed in the quickly developing sector of cloud computing.

Finally,   a   case study of   AWS retail case studies offers a range of features and advantages. These studies show how firms in various industries use AWS for innovation and growth, from scalability to cost efficiency. AWS offers a robust infrastructure and a range of technologies to satisfy changing business needs, whether related to improving customer experiences with cloud-based solutions or streamlining processes using AI and machine learning. These case studies provide substantial proof of AWS's influence on digital transformation and the success of organizations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

From the case study of Amazon web services, companies can learn how other businesses use AWS services to solve real-world problems, increase productivity, cut expenses, and innovate. For those looking to optimize their cloud strategy and operations, these case studies provide insightful information, optimal methodologies, and purpose. 

You can obtain case studies on AWS through the AWS website, which has a special section with a large selection of case studies from different industries. In addition, AWS releases updated case studies regularly via various marketing platforms and on its blog.

The case study of Amazon web services, which offers specific instances of how AWS services have been successfully applied in various settings, can significantly assist in the decision-making process for IT initiatives. Project planning and strategy can be informed by the insights, best practices, and possible solutions these case studies provide.

Kingson Jebaraj

Kingson Jebaraj is a highly respected technology professional, recognized as both a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and an Alibaba Most Valuable Professional. With a wealth of experience in cloud computing, Kingson has collaborated with renowned companies like Microsoft, Reliance Telco, Novartis, Pacific Controls UAE, Alibaba Cloud, and G42 UAE. He specializes in architecting innovative solutions using emerging technologies, including cloud and edge computing, digital transformation, IoT, and programming languages like C, C++, Python, and NLP. 

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AWS Use Cases – From Web Apps to Big Data

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering a vast array of services that cater to different needs and objectives. From startups to large enterprises, AWS provides scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions. This article delves into various AWS use cases , demonstrating how diverse industries leverage AWS to innovate, scale, and maintain efficiency.

Table of Contents

Hosting web applications.

One of the primary uses of AWS is hosting web applications. Services like Elastic Beanstalk , EC2 , and Lambda offer businesses the tools to deploy and manage web applications efficiently. Elastic Beanstalk automates deployment, while EC2 provides secure, resizable compute capacity. Lambda, a serverless computing service, allows running code without managing servers. This flexibility is crucial for businesses scaling their web presence.

Data Storage and Management

AWS offers robust solutions for data storage and management, crucial for businesses handling large volumes of data. Services like Simple Storage Service (S3) , Elastic Block Store (EBS) , and Glacier cater to different data storage needs. S3 offers scalable object storage, EBS provides block-level storage volumes for EC2 instances, and Glacier is ideal for long-term data archiving. Tools like Amazon Redshift , DynamoDB , and RDS enhance data management and analysis capabilities.

Internet of Things (IoT)

AWS is instrumental in IoT advancements, providing services like AWS IoT Core , AWS IoT Analytics , and AWS IoT Greengrass . These services help businesses connect, manage, and analyze IoT devices efficiently. AWS IoT Core offers a secure platform for IoT device connection, while IoT Analytics processes and analyzes IoT-generated data. IoT Greengrass enables local compute, messaging, and data caching for IoT devices.

Big Data and Analytics

AWS’s Big Data services, such as EMR (Elastic MapReduce) , provide powerful tools for processing vast amounts of data. Companies leverage these services for data warehousing, log analysis, web indexing, and data analytics. AWS’s scalability and powerful analytics tools help businesses gain insights and make data-driven decisions.

Enterprise IT

AWS streamlines IT operations for enterprises by offering secure storage, scalability, and flexibility. With AWS, companies can innovate faster, reducing the time and cost associated with maintaining IT infrastructure. AWS’s cloud architecture supports a wide range of IT needs, from storage to complex application deployment.

E-commerce Solutions

AWS provides comprehensive solutions for e-commerce businesses. Services like Amazon RDS and DynamoDB support high-traffic websites, ensuring smooth user experiences during peak times. AWS’s scalability and security features are essential for e-commerce platforms that require reliable, secure, and efficient operations.

Disaster Recovery

AWS’s disaster recovery services ensure business continuity by providing data backup, storage, and recovery solutions. AWS enables quick recovery of IT infrastructure in case of disasters, minimizing downtime and data loss. This resilience is crucial for maintaining trust and operational stability.

Cloud Migration

AWS facilitates seamless cloud migration for businesses transitioning from traditional on-premises setups. Services like AWS Migration Hub and Server Migration Service simplify the process, ensuring minimal disruption. This is crucial for businesses looking to modernize their IT infrastructure and capitalize on cloud benefits.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

AWS offers a range of services for machine learning and AI, such as Amazon SageMaker , which simplifies the process of building, training, and deploying machine learning models. This is instrumental for businesses looking to leverage AI for predictive analytics, personalization, and automated decision-making.

Mobile and Web Application Development

AWS Amplify and AWS AppSync are powerful tools for developing and hosting mobile and web applications. They provide a secure environment with features like authentication, data synchronization, and API integration, making it easier for developers to create responsive and feature-rich applications.

DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

AWS supports DevOps practices by offering services like AWS CodeBuild , AWS CodeDeploy , and AWS CodePipeline . These tools automate software delivery processes, enabling businesses to build, test, and deploy applications with greater speed and efficiency.

AWS provides game tech solutions that support game development, deployment, and scaling. Services like Amazon GameLift optimize game server hosting for multiplayer games, ensuring low-latency experiences for players worldwide.

Media and Entertainment

AWS offers solutions tailored for media and entertainment industries, including content creation, media storage, and distribution. Services like AWS Elemental MediaLive and Amazon CloudFront enable businesses to deliver high-quality streaming experiences to global audiences.

Financial Services

AWS provides secure and compliant cloud solutions for the financial sector. Services like AWS Shield and Amazon Macie offer advanced security features that are crucial for handling sensitive financial data and complying with industry regulations.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

AWS supports healthcare and life sciences industries with services that enhance patient care, data management, and research capabilities. Tools like Amazon HealthLake facilitate secure data storage and analysis, aiding in medical research and healthcare service improvements.

AWS’s diverse offerings cater to a wide range of business needs, making it a go-to solution for various industries. From web hosting to IoT, AWS provides the tools and infrastructure necessary for businesses to thrive in the digital era. For more information on how AWS can benefit your business, visit Cloudvisor’s AWS Resell Services .

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AWS Case Study: QSR Adopts Amazon RedShift for Cost-Effective Analysis

• March 13, 2018

We recently had the opportunity to work with a popular quick-serve restaurant (QSR) who reached out asking if Flux7 could help speed its developer outcomes for faster time to market. For this global enterprise, the goal manifested itself in a project where Flux7 helped the QSR create one-click automated installations of various products, including Amazon Redshift, through AWS Service Catalog which helped make development more efficient and productive– through automation that minimized process overhead. Today we’d like to share the story of this AWS case study project.

We began the first two phases of the project by setting up AWS Service Catalog, Amazon’s service that allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. We set up AWS Service Catalog with eight products of two kinds: the first was an iis-stack which consisted of a Windows and an MsSQL instance. The second was a Tomcat stack which consisted of a Linux instance with RDS MySQL in the backend.

In both cases, the application was pre-installed automatically: Tomcat on Linux and ISS in Windows. All products were tested and launched in the correct environments, with all of the customer’s pre-defined controls, and standard tags, within minutes with minimal human effort.

Next, we set out to deploy and scale resources based on Amazon Redshift, AWS’s fast, simple, cost-effective data warehouse service. To do so, the teams first needed to launch the Amazon Redshift cluster. The AWS experts at Flux7 did so by creating individual AWS CloudFormation templates in JSON format to deploy resources to set up, operate and scale an Amazon Redshift Cluster. The cluster had several important considerations:

• The customer required that the mapping values were set to use a specific VPC.
• Product-specific parameters such as name, email, instance type, data classification etc. were to be used.
• Last, the output would be the deployed product.

The Redshift tagging Lambda function implements tagging on Redshift clusters, parameter groups and subnet groups following the customer’s tagging nomenclature. It does so through a mapping that is used upon the creation of a Redshift product. The last step of the process was to deploy and provision a Redshift warehouse service cluster as the data analytics team also wanted to use the AWS Service Catalog to create RedShift clusters on-demand in a self-serve format.

Following setup, Flux7 conducted thorough knowledge transfer to this leading quick-serve purveyor, teaching the customer’s teams how to use the new Service Catalog products and Redshift cluster moving forward to maximize their effectiveness while ensuring long-term success.

As seen in this project, faster time to market is achieved through self-serve IT which allows developers to access and self-provision, growing their productivity as they no longer need to wait in queue for system resources to be spun up for them. Indeed, this global enterprise took a process that formerly would have taken days, and reduced it to five minutes, growing the team’s efficiency and agility.

Moreover, by effectively integrating this S&P 500 firm’s tagging policy and processes into the solution, they now also have billing tags associated with new assets, whenever a user spins up an instance, ensuring that they can do not only cross-charge between departments, but easily and effectively manage costs. For additional reading on speeding time to market and reducing costs, please read our AWS Case Studies:

• Leading Restaurateur Achieves Self-Service IT with Flux7 & AWS Service Catalog
• AWS Service Catalog Example: Increase Developer Productivity and Business Responsiveness
• Seven Business-Impacting Reasons to Adopt a DevOps Model

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You are here: Influencer Marketing Hub » Social Media » Valuable Insights from Social Media Platform Case Studies Based on Real-Life Success Stories

Valuable Insights from Social Media Platform Case Studies Based on Real-Life Success Stories

For brands, it can be a struggle to understand how each social media platform works and how to use them for marketing. To grow your brand this year, get inspiration from actual social media platform case studies where we go through real-life applications so you can learn what works and what doesn’t when it comes to social media marketing.

Valuable Insights from Social Media Platform Case Studies Based on Real-Life Success Stories:

Why social media marketing is still relevant, social media platform case studies to gain insights from, key metrics to monitor the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, be guided by learnings from social media marketing case studies, frequently asked questions.

More than 50% of shoppers discover and purchase new products through social media . By 2024, the number of these social buyers is projected to reach over 110 million—and that’s in the US alone. Millennials, along with digital natives Gen Zs and Gen Alphas, are known to purchase directly from social channels. This consumer base is just too massive to ignore. Moreover, the power of social media also goes beyond the internet. After discovering products online, many social media users eventually buy them in physical stores.

Social commerce stats also prove how effective these social media platforms are for marketing. With most consumers spending several hours each day on social media, these platforms are undoubtedly the best places to reach them. Implementing social media marketing strategies to stay visible in these spaces—especially ones frequented by the younger generation—is a prime opportunity for revenue growth.

The following case studies give us a glimpse of how different brands successfully implemented their campaigns. These studies contain a wealth of insights and strategies that you can apply to your own marketing initiatives.

1. Purr-fectly Viral: Whisker’s Litter-Robot LR4 Conquers the Internet

Agency: Ubiquitous

Platforms: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Whisker has been providing paw-parents with self-cleaning litter boxes for over two decades. In 2022, they launched their 4 th generation Litter-Robot: the LR4. Wanting to dominate the pet market with their latest innovation, they sought the services of Ubiquitous to amplify the marketing of Litter-Robot LR4.

Strategy: 

Ubiquitous used a combination of in-house influencers and existing relationships with other agencies to expand the influencer pool. The budget was strategically divided among Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Instagram and TikTok aimed for broad awareness, while YouTube targeted serious buyers with high-intent content like tech reviews.

The agency used their proprietary technology to find influencer pet owners with engaged audiences and disposable income. Once the key influencers were identified, they were given specific guidelines to create content with some space for creative freedom. During an eight-week period, multiple posts were published on the three platforms, such as unboxing videos or clips of cats using LR4.

The campaign was a success across all platforms. The 130 posts that went live amassed a total of 68.1M views, 7.3M engagements, and a cumulative CPM of $7.27. Litter Robot saw site visits surpassing the 100K mark, and over one hundred transactions translated into an additional six-figure revenue.

Key Takeaway:

The Litter-Robot LR4 campaign underscores the power of strategic influencer marketing and the effectiveness of a multi-platform approach to maximize impact. The careful selection of influencers, diversification of platforms, and leeway given to campaign partners in terms of creative expression all contributed to the success of the campaign.

2. Illuminating Holiday Success: Energizer Makes Portable Lighting “Bunny-Famous”

Agency: Viral Nation

Platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram

Most well-known for its iconic bunny and long-lasting batteries, Energizer sought to extend its brand appeal by positioning itself as the top choice for portable lighting. It was set on making its new products—the Energizer Headlamp and the TAC 700 Flashlight—household must-haves during the holidays and beyond. To do so, they enlisted the help of Viral Nation to launch a multi-platform marketing campaign. 

To boost sales during the holiday season, the campaign was focused on highlighting the new Energizer products as great stocking stuffers. Viral Nation engaged six influencers to publish content on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram and drive viewers to purchase directly from Energizer’s dedicated Amazon product pages.

Each influencer received both the products and integrated Energizer into their holiday-themed content.  The partners did unboxings, point-of-view reviews, and even hosted appearances by the beloved Energizer Bunny.

Viral Nation’s metrics speak for themselves: 832K interactions, 806K views, and 4.6K clicks. The campaign achieved substantial reach across platforms and successfully directed traffic to Energizer product pages.

The authentic and diverse promotional content led to a success that lit up the holidays, and the influencers effectively positioned Energizer as the go-to brand for portable lighting. The content they created not only drove awareness but also contributed to increased sales during the crucial retail period.

This Energizer campaign shows influencer marketing as a bright approach to holiday marketing. It highlights the effectiveness of tailored social media marketing strategies during key seasons. The strategic collaboration with influencers and campaign implementation on multiple platforms help brands shine brightly in the eyes of consumers.

3. Astronomical Success: Samsung Sees Galactic Growth of its Galaxy App Store 

Agency: Moburst

Platforms: Facebook, X (Twitter), and other channels

To enhance user experience, Samsung launched a dedicated app store in the US called the Galaxy Apps. Noticing slow engagement, they aimed to boost marketing to increase app downloads, user retention, and revenue for the app. They also wanted to raise brand awareness and promote the personalization features of Galaxy devices. To create and implement effective marketing campaigns, they sought Moburst's services.

Moburst implemented a comprehensive strategy of leveraging various media channels to target distinct audience segments. They did micro-segmentation and tailored their campaigns to specific user interests: Gamers were directed to the gaming section, Galaxy advocates were guided to the Made for Samsung section, and design enthusiasts were offered font and theme options for personalized phone customization.

The targeted campaigns and personalized approach led to a significant increase in app downloads that translated into a substantial revenue boost. Galaxy Apps downloads surged by 79%, and revenue increased by 36%. Social media engagement also saw an astronomical rise, with Facebook followers skyrocketing by over 1,400%.

Samsung’s collaboration with Moburst is a good example of how to run micro-segmented mobile marketing strategies on social media platforms. By understanding the diverse preferences of Samsung's vast user base, Moburst was able to craft tailored campaigns that resonated with specific audience segments.

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4. Cobra Kai Chop: Netflix High Kicks Campaign on TikTok

Agency: NeoReach

Platform: TikTok

The Cobra Kai series is one of the most successful shows in Netflix history. Following the immense success of the first two seasons, Netflix pulled out all the stops to make the third season equally successful.

To build hype before the release of Cobra Kai 3, Netflix collaborated with NeoReach in crafting social media marketing campaigns. The agency formed an eclectic roster of influencers from its vast pool and designed a campaign focused on creating buzz. The platform of choice for this campaign was TikTok, which at the time was still a burgeoning social media platform with highly engaged users.

NeoReach tapped its pool of influencers to heighten the anticipation for the upcoming season. The lineup included creators from various backgrounds to ensure a wide-reaching and culturally diverse promotion in major countries worldwide.

The agency used TikTok’s interactive Cobra Kai Chop filter that allowed influencers to creatively incorporate the brand into their content. Using the hashtag #CobraKaiChop also enhanced visibility and awareness.

The campaign achieved remarkable results, with 2.8M+ views from paid content and 4.6B views from #CobraKaiChop. But the campaign’s success was not just in views. It also delivered 24K+ in engagement value and an ROI of 2.76X.

The success of the Cobra Kai Chop campaign gives marketers a glimpse of how to effectively leverage emerging social media platforms. It emphasizes the need for creative content strategies and diverse influencer rosters to resonate with different audience segments.

5. Fresh Strategies: HelloFresh Delights Users with TikTok Culinary Adventures 

Agency: Hype Factory

HelloFresh—the pioneers of fresh food and meal kit delivery services—wanted to boost views and conversions within its niche market. To achieve this, they collaborated with Hype Factory to create a recipe for marketing success.

Hype Factory engaged 24 large entertainment influencers and gave them full creative freedom to make content that highlighted the features of HelloFresh. To enhance visibility and engagement, the campaign used Spark Ads with discount codes and direct links in the bio. Reposting the content as Reels or Stories on Instagram further expanded the reach beyond TikTok.

With a 4.03M reach and 13.3K clicks, the campaign definitely elicited strong engagement. The genuine interaction of the creators with their audience was key to the campaign’s success.

The HelloFresh campaign serves as a reminder to adapt to evolving consumer trends and the constantly changing dynamics of social media platforms. It also stresses the importance of embracing the creative freedom of influencers to pave the way for more authentic brand engagements.

Monitoring metrics is important for measuring the effectiveness of your current campaigns and optimizing subsequent ones. For social media marketing, here are some of the key metrics you need to keep a close eye on:

This refers to the number of social media users who have seen your posts and gives you an idea of the approximate size of your audience. A broader reach often translates to increased visibility. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are forecasted to be the leading channels for social commerce , so you might want to focus on amplifying reach on these platforms. 

Impressions

This measures the overall visibility of your content. It refers only to the total number of times your posts have been viewed, regardless of whether they have been clicked or not. This will help you gauge how frequently your audience encounters your posts.

This metric consolidates the number of likes, comments, mentions, shares, and clicks on your posts. High engagement shows that your audience finds your posts interesting or valuable. 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is expressed as the percentage of users who navigate away from your social media page after a few seconds. A high bounce rate indicates that your content does not resonate with your audience and signals a need to revamp your strategy and tailor your content to align with your audience’s needs.

Customer Sentiment

This indicates the overall attitude or feelings of your audience towards your brand and is often assessed through comments and sentiment analysis. By understanding customer sentiment, you can tailor your future marketing content and shape your online reputation.

Each case study offers valuable lessons that emphasize the importance of strategic influencer collaboration, multi-platform approaches, and tailored strategies. The proven success of these campaigns brings to light the universal principles that underpin effective social media marketing.

Still, every business is unique. Tweak the strategies you learned from these social media platform case studies to align them with your brand’s distinct goals. Determine the right social media channels for your business and focus your efforts there. The future unfolds a vast canvas for innovative marketing campaigns—paint it with insights gleaned from the compelling case studies we shared.

How can social media platform case studies help me craft marketing strategies for my brand?

Case studies show how marketing strategies are implemented in real life. They showcase proven tactics and actionable insights that help other brands implement similar strategies for their own businesses. 

Why is the selection of social media platforms important for marketing success?

While most people have multiple social media accounts, each platform still has its own nuances and appeal to different consumer segments. Choosing a social media platform is the same as choosing the right channels for broadcasting your message to the right audience. To amplify reach and engagement, focus on platforms where your target audience is most engaged.

How do I apply the key takeaways from social media platform case studies to my brand?

Identify similarities between your brand and the featured case studies, then tailor the successful strategies to align with your unique goals, audience, and industry. Use the case studies as inspiration to innovate and optimize your own social media marketing efforts.

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