Hysteresis is an important nonlinear effect exhibited by the piezoelectric actuators (PEA) and its control has been drawing considerable attention. This paper presents the development of a novel control scheme for the PEA, by integrating the inversion feedforward control and proportional-integral-derivative (PID)-based sliding mode control (SMC). The resultant scheme allows for the compensation for the nonlinear hysteresis, meanwhile eliminating the chattering problem and achieving the zero steady state error. To verify its effectiveness, experiments were performed on a commercially-available PEA, as compared to the use of PID-based SMC alone. It shows that by integrating the inversion feedforward control, the hysteresis of the piezoelectric actuator can be compensated more effectively and thus a better tracking performance can be achieved.