YouTube ads allow you to reach a different audience in a different way, compared with text and banner ads. Video’s great for showing off products, engaging with prospective customers, and explaining processes that might be complicated to explain with just text.

As with Adwords text ads, you don’t pay for every impression of your ad. With Adwords text ads, you only pay for clicks. With YouTube ads, you don’t pay if people watch less than 30 seconds’ worth of a longer ad, or if they don’t watch to the end of an ad that lasts for 30 seconds or less.

It’s easy to create and manage YouTubes ads if you already have a Google Adwords account… except that step one is to upload your video ad to YouTube.

Where do you get that video ad?

Having a video ad made can be a costly endeavor if you hire someone to do it for you. We’ve talked with video companies in our region for clients, and entry level is thousands of dollars.

Doing it yourself can be even worse. Determining the message you want to convey, writing the script, filming, editing, and then uploading your video and adding the required information — it can be daunting. Plus, we’ve all seen plenty of bad video ads. You can invest a lot of time and money and end up with something you don’t want to publish.

Now, there’s an app that can make it easier.

Download YouTube Director Pro for your iOS device. As of this writing, it’s free. We hear that it may not stay that way. Right now, though, you can just grab it at the iTunes store and install it for free.

Pick a theme from the many, many options. You can choose by industry or by the type of content, from a business overview to staff profiles, testimonials, or how-to videos.

Once you choose a template to use, the app will give you an outline. In the screenshot below, the template is for a health tips video.

Click on the first item and you’ll be given some specific instructions for creating the first segment of your video. We’d go ahead and use these prompts to create a script, but you might feel comfortable just having your spokesperson ad lib within the directions given.

The app will count the second for you on the screen, so it’s easy to keep the segments to the right length. You’ll be prompted to type things in for titles, and you just click when you finish each segment.

Continue with the remaining segments. When you finish, the app will edit and produce the video for you, and help you upload it to YouTube.

You still need to manage your ads well to get the results you want, but the barriers to entry for creating a video ad have just gotten a lot lower.

Try it out. We’ll be happy to help you get from the video to the ad campaign.