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Business Intelligence (BI) and Competitive Intelligence (CI) are both critical for improving the performance and success rate for your organization. While both are different in practice, when put together, they are an equation for business success. Business Intelligence focuses more on internal strategies, where Competitive Intelligence allows businesses to focus on what’s happening outside the four walls of a company.

As part of analyzing the competitive landscape and turning that intelligence into impactful resources for sales, marketing, or product teams, product marketers consume a lot of data. From gathering intel on competitors’ product pages to diving into their help sites to examining job postings and case studies, every bit of competitive intelligence data is critical to a product marketer’s analysis. But how do you actually analyze the data to ultimately come out with takeaways and action items to help your team win against the competition? Here are three competitive analysis frameworks that every product marketer should know.

What is a product marketer, exactly? The simplest way to explain the responsibility of a product marketer is that they’re responsible for, well, marketing the product. In addition to hiring a product marketer or a product marketing team, there is another resource that can act as a reliable product marketer - your customers. How exactly can your customers be considered as your product marketers? The voice of your customers can do a lot to enhance your product marketing strategy. Here are six ways that you can have your customers help you out as an extension of your product marketing team.

You won’t be able to see success within your organization unless your sales and marketing teams are aligned. This is true when it comes to goals, initiatives, and strategies—including your competitive intelligence (CI) strategies. There are only minimal barriers preventing marketers from deriving actionable competitive intelligence from their day-to-day activities to help sales succeed. There’s also little preventing sales from passing anecdotal intel back to marketing for ultra-targeted content and campaign productions. Yet many sales and marketing teams are not yet aligned in their CI strategy.

If your prior marketing and sales alignment attempts stumbled, perhaps your new impetus lies in a holistic competitive intelligence methodology.