Ongoing development of quantum simulators allows for a progressively finer degree of control of quantum many-body systems. This motivates the development of efficient approaches to facilitate the control of such systems and enable the preparation of non-trivial quantum states. Here we formulate an approach to control quantum systems based on matrix product states (MPS). We compare counter-diabatic and leakage minimization approaches to the so-called local steering problem, that consists in finding the best value of the control parameters for generating a unitary evolution of the specific MPS state in a given direction. In order to benchmark the different approaches, we apply them to the generalization of the PXP model known to exhibit coherent quantum dynamics due to quantum many-body scars. We find that the leakage-based approach generally outperforms the counter-diabatic framework and use it to construct a Floquet model with quantum scars. Finally, we perform the first steps towards global trajectory optimization and demonstrate entanglement steering capabilities in the generalized PXP model.