inlyte energy

Inlyte’s successful factory test, witnessed by Southern Company

Landing a feature story with The wall street journal

The News

Inlyte Energy makes iron-sodium battery energy storage systems — a technology with serious commercial potential in a market in high demand for alternatives to lithium-ion and diesel backup. Their milestone: the successful completion of a factory acceptance test of their first field-ready battery at their facility near Derby, UK, witnessed by representatives from Southern Company, one of the largest energy providers in the United States.

The test demonstrated the performance and integration readiness of Inlyte's battery storage system — combining advanced sodium metal chloride cells, inverter, and control electronics — a major step on the company's path to commercialization.

The Strategy

The media strategy was anchored in an exclusive story with a top-tier publication. The Inlyte team mentioned Ed Ballard, a clean tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal, as a potential target they had met at an event a year prior. With Ed’s proximity to Inlyte’s facility in Derby, UK, the exclusive offering was three-fold: a tour of the facility, the chance to witness the factory test firsthand, and a separate interview with Inlyte's CEO.

With the exclusive locked in, the rest of the campaign was built around it. A press release went out on announcement day, timed to support the WSJ story rather than compete with it. Simultaneous outreach to trade publications in energy, cleantech, and industry press ensured the news traveled beyond the WSJ's readership and into the specific verticals where Inlyte's customers and partners live.

The result: 21 pieces of coverage in total — one definitive feature in a global business publication, and 20 supporting stories that drove the news deeper into the right audiences.

Why It Worked

A feature in The Wall Street Journal doesn’t happen. You can only earn this type of coverage by knowing which reporters care about what, understanding what gives them a reason to say yes, and building an offer they can't get anywhere else.

The broader campaign worked because each element had a job to do. The exclusive created credibility and drove the news cycle. The press release gave every other outlet a clean, citable version of the facts. The trade outreach made sure the story landed where it needed to.

For Inlyte Energy, this was the right story, told by the right voice, amplified through the right channels. That's what a well-executed media strategy looks like, and it starts with knowing the difference between news that deserves a blast and news that deserves a plan.

Read the full story here: A Battery Dream That Never Lost Its Charge