How to Use Amazon Web Services in Your Marketing Strategy
In today’s technological-oriented marketing landscape, businesses find their marketing budgets caving under monthly MarTech (Marketing Technology) fees. That doesn’t have to be the case. You can take advantage of the free tiers and on-demand pricing models offered by AWS to improve your marketing strategy.
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy contains the details of your marketing efforts. A solid marketing strategy allows businesses to maintain visibility, generate interest to draw in potential customers, and maintain the interest of returning customers.
Here are key points every marketing strategy should contain:
- Market research, including data about competitors
- Target audience, including identifying needs micro-segments
- A SWOT analysis of your business
- A marketing budget
- Your chosen media channels (social media, website, billboards, etc)
- A detailed marketing funnel
- A content strategy
Once you have all of this information, you’ll be able to create clearly defined goals. These goals are your action steps, and will accompany you daily as you work to ensure that your marketing strategies remain fruitful.
Remember that no plan is set in stone, and the only thing you should strive to maintain at all cost is your budget. Otherwise, keep your strategy flexible and fresh. The simplest way of keeping your marketing strategy current, is using MarTech (Marketing Technology).
MarTech — When Marketing and Technology Join Forces
Marketing Technology (MarTech) is a category of technological tools that support marketing efforts. Today, there is a wide range of MarTech tools, dedicated for promotion, advertising, content editing and distribution, social media publishing and more.
If you’re using Google Analytics to keep track of your marketing efforts, SEMrush to keep track of your SEO efforts, Wordpress to set up and manage your website, and Facebook Business Manager to create and manage Facebook ads — you’re using MarTech.
If you’re using Shopify or Magento to set up an eCommerce business, a digital asset management system (DAM) to organize and distribute digital assets, and a survey service to collect data about your customers — you’re using MarTech.
MarTech is an umbrella term that covers many technological tools, all of which are part of a business’s marketing strategy. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not typically mentioned in terms of MarTech, but it has many marketing applications that can reduce your costs significantly.
What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform that provides access to over 165 remote computing services. The AWS platform is user friendly, secure and simple. Each service is tailored-made for a specific need, and all services are accessible and controlled through the AWS platform.
Before cloud computing, if you needed to host a website, store data or create and maintain games, you would need a physical facility — a data center — to house the computing resources that power these processes. The problem was, data centers were expensive to design, set up and maintain. Many couldn’t afford a data center of their own. AWS changed that.
Today, instead of owning a data center, businesses of all sizes and types can source computing power from AWS and other cloud providers. In the cloud model, the cloud provider takes over the responsibility for setting up and maintaining a data centers — no, they haven’t disappeared. Data centers are still providing computing power. The difference is that now cloud users only need to pay for the service they use, rather than the entire data center.
Cloud Services — What Are They and Why Should You Care?
Before jumping into the ‘how’ of AWS services, you first need to understand what cloud services are. In the cloud computing model, there are different types of services that offer different levels of computing resources. Each level forms a category that contains related services.
Cloud Service Type
What You Pay For
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Networking, virtual machines, servers and storage
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Operating systems and execution environments
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
Storage and backup
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Remote access to software
In AWS, cloud services are offered on-demand. That means you pay only for what you use. AWS also offers free tiers, which means that you can experiment with a service, and grow at scale. Any of these cloud categories can serve your marketing efforts, especially if you’re using MarTech (Marketing Technology).
How to Use Amazon Web Services to Improve Your Marketing
1. Hosting for Landing Pages
AWS offers a variety of storage services, all of which are cloud-based. That means you can easily set up a storage repository for your landing pages. For example, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cheap storage service that also comes with a free tier.
You can design your own landing pages (or hire a designer), and then deploy (publish) them through Amazon S3. Since landing pages often have short lifespan (for as long as the campaign is relevant), you could remove them from S3 and keep your costs at the minimum (even in the free tier).
2. Email Marketing
Most newsletter services today offer pretty user interface with cool features. However, if you have a big mailing list, the price per email can get expensive. If you set up a newsletter system through AWS, you could reduce the costs significantly.
You can design your newsletter campaigns through sendy.co, and then deploy them through Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). Sendy is a self-hosted application that costs $59, and that’s it. Amazon SES has a free tier that won’t charge you for the first 62,000 emails you send. Setting up the two solutions can save you hundreds and thousands of dollars in newsletter fees.
3. Hosting for eCommerce
Storage costs money. The more storage space you consume, the more you pay. For eCommerce platforms, once you reach your platform’s storage plan, one more product could be the difference between staying within the budget or arriving to the realm of overhead.
You can use Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2) for hosting your website, enjoying the free tier and low-cost virtual machine service, which includes AWS backup and security, as well as integrations with a number of third-party services.
It’s a Wrap!
AWS provide numerous cloud computing resources, any of which could be used to reduce the costs of your marketing efforts, as well as add layers of backup and security. Setting up an AWS account is simple and fast. All AWS services provide on-demand pricing modules, and many offer a free tier. If you’re willing to learn how to use the AWS platform and services of your choice, you’ll be rewarded with a significant reduction in your marketing expenses.
