Sensemaking Sessions: How Digital Marketing Stops Playing Insight Circles

Good morning, colleagues. Digital teams learned to collect more signals than they can digest. Every week—new reports, retros, "insights" from Telegram chats, memos from contractors. All this gets dumped into Notion, where it dies. People go in circles, repeating the same hypotheses. To break out of this collage, we run sensemaking sessions. This isn't a chat circle, not "come up with an idea in 15 minutes," but a discipline that connects data, people, and strategy.

What Is Sensemaking in Marketing

If we turn to Karl Weick's definition on Wikipedia, sensemaking is a process where a team makes sense of ambiguous information and turns it into actions. In marketing, this means: take scattered metrics, user feedback, trends, constraints, and assemble a meaning map. No esoterics, just logic. This process is essential for AI orchestration and building effective marketing strategies.

Meme vs. Method

What a Live Session Looks Like

1. Preparation — gather the deck team: marketing, product, analytics, AI, support. Assign a facilitator (usually me or someone from the strategy team).
2. Artifact collection — export LTV, CAC, retention metrics, take call recordings, customer support, traffic reports.
3. Labels and clusters — on a virtual board (Miro, FigJam), lay out signals: segment behavior, barriers, insights.
4. Meaning mapping — connect where causes, consequences, triggers are. Form theses.
5. Hypotheses and decisions — for each "problem → trigger → hypothesis" link, assign an owner, deadline, success criteria.
6. Documentation — transfer everything to a solution: table, Confluence, Notion. This isn't a pretty protocol, but a project plan.

In the end, a map appears where priorities are visible. For example:

• Segment "new players"—high churn due to complex onboarding.
• Hypothesis: need a simplified product version + onboarding message series.
• Actions: connect AI from AI orchestration for message personalization, redesign UX, set up CRM validation.

Why This Works Better Than an Hour Meeting

Sensemaking is attention management. We're not trying to come up with a "creative idea," we're creating a coordinate system. When the map is ready, decisions are made faster. We save a week of discussions because we already know where the pain is, who feels it, and what to do about it.

In this sense, any "insight circles" are profanation. If you just share opinions, nothing changes. I already showed how in iGaming attention economics, player expectation wins, not a beautiful facade. Sensemaking returns teams to reality: here are real numbers, here's behavior, here's what we'll do. This approach is fundamental to understanding attention economics in iGaming and building effective marketing strategies.

Facilitation Nuances

To prevent the session from turning into a sprint of shouting, there are several rules:

• Clear timing — each section is time-limited. Want to speak—prepare.
• Veto right — if there's no data, say "we don't know" and record an observation, not a conclusion.
• AI as assistant — use models to aggregate feedback, but people make final conclusions. AI is a partner, not a leader.
• Documents at start — participants receive prepared artifacts in advance. The session isn't a place for first encounter with numbers.

How This Connects to AI and Product

Sensemaking is an injector for further processes. After the session, we:

• Pass hypotheses to the AI team so they assemble modules and orchestrate marketing.
• Notify product: what UX changes are needed, where's the bottleneck.
• Set up communications: for example, launch an email series with a new tone to avoid sliding into corporate influencer simulation.

Teams that skip sensemaking usually live in chaos: everyone pulls in their direction, hypotheses aren't synchronized, budgets flow into sand.

Example Artifact: Meaning Map

Such tables aren't decoration. Tasks, budgets, deadlines emerge from them. This is how authoritative brands stop playing "we're doing a redesign because it's scary to stand still" and start changing product.

FAQ

How Is Sensemaking Different from Brainstorming?

Brainstorming is about ideas, sensemaking is about meaning. We're not trying to "come up with something new," we're structuring what's already happening to make a decision. The tool is like strategic reconnaissance. Brainstorming often turns into an ego competition.

How Long Does a Session Take?

2 to 4 hours. Preparation—a day or two. After the session, another day goes to documentation and task launch. But the savings of subsequent weeks are huge: the team understands what to do, where boundaries are, where to look to avoid drowning in gossip and "insights from chat."

What Materials Are Needed?

Metrics (LTV, CAC, churn), qualitative data (interviews, customer support), content (what we're publishing now), product plans, partner feedback. The more reality, the better. Connect AI assistants to tag data, but final analysis—manual. Otherwise, you get a machine redesign without strategy.

Most Common Mistakes

• Too many people — 20 people in Zoom turn the session into a meeting. Need 6-8 key figures.
• No facilitator — when there's no leader, meaning scatters. Need someone who holds focus and summarizes.
• No follow-up — if after the session you don't record decisions and assign owners, everything will be forgotten.
• Ignoring external context — market intelligence, regulatory news, even gossip. We consider them, but don't build strategy on rumors.

Why This Is Useful for SEO and Content

Sensemaking helps make content "to the point." When you have a meaning map, you know what to write about, which cases to reveal, which keywords to lean on. For us, it works like this:

• Hypothesis → article topic → keyword list → cross-links within blog → FAQ based on client questions.
• Using this text as an example, we've already connected AI, digital influencers, attention economics, and redesign topics. Search engines see structure, and readers get real value.

To further strengthen E-E-A-T, add external links to authoritative sources. Besides Wikipedia, you can reference McKinsey or Accenture research on marketing transformation. Sharing links shows you're not stewing in your own juice.

Glossary Terms

This article references several key concepts from the Casinokrisa glossary:

• Sensemaking — A process where a team makes sense of ambiguous information and turns it into actions
• Meaning Map — A visual or structured representation that connects data, insights, problems, and solutions
• LTV — Lifetime Value. The total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with a business
• CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost. The total cost of acquiring a new customer
• ROMI — Return on Marketing Investment. A metric that measures the revenue generated from marketing activities relative to the cost

Related Processes

• Sensemaking Process — Process for making sense of ambiguous information: gather data, create meaning map, identify patterns, generate actions
• AI Orchestration Process — Step-by-step process for integrating AI into marketing workflows: data collection, solution generation, execution, retrospectives

Related Topics

• Marketing Strategy — Digital marketing, performance marketing, strategic approaches to growth
• Analytics & Data — Data analysis, metrics, measurement, and data-driven decision making
• AI & Automation — Artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation in marketing and business

Related Terms

• Data Pipeline — The infrastructure for collecting, processing, and analyzing data
• AI Orchestration — A managed set of processes where AI models are embedded in daily work
• Media Buying — The process of purchasing advertising space across digital channels

Related Media

• Denis Denzil, Head of Affiliate: From Sports to Leadership in Financial Marketing — A conversation about how a sports background shapes the approach to managing affiliate programs and financial marketing
• Rafael Gabitov — 17 Years in Arbitrage: Diasp, Indigo, FBTool and Other Success Stories — A long-term perspective on traffic arbitrage: how tools and strategies have evolved over nearly two decades

In Conclusion

Sensemaking isn't a trendy term, but a vitally necessary tool for teams tired of a series of useless meetings. It's an opportunity to stop, look at reality, and say: "Here are our pains, here are solutions, here's who's responsible." Without this, you'll endlessly postpone deadlines, invent "new" ideas, and burn out trying to catch up with competition. With sensemaking, we return the right to conscious marketing. We still have time for sarcasm and philosophy. We're people, not corporate avatars.