Adobe Illustrator - How to I live trace text and an image to one?

I'm using Adobe Illustrator. I have uploaded an image to my workspace within AI. I inserted text along a path to arch above the image. When I trace the images, they still remain as 2 separate items. How do I "marry" them together so when I transfer the image to my plotter it reads it as one image rather than 2 items. The trouble with the plotter reading it as 2 images is that it wants to cut them in 2 different jobs and not together.

Thanks.